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1 year agoR710 (or anything of that era, really) = fan heater / air con ballast that happens to be able to compute as a side-effect.
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Cake day: October 26th, 2023
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Assuming they’re running at their rated 5250 watts, which they’re probably not:
5250 watts x 24 hours = 126kWh per day. PER DAY!
126kWh x 30 days = 3780 kWh a month, which is approximately four times my entire domestic electricity consumption (including my own home lab, operational network, two EVs and heat pumps).
That is preposterous and ruinous financially. You do not want to do that, I promise you.
They almost certainly won’t be running at their rated maximum power, but even 20% of that run 24/7 is still a ruinous amount of electrical load. Unless your power is somehow free, you want to think very seriously before deploying that.
Generally speaking, if your equipment is actively powered it will be generating heat and therefore condensation isn’t an issue as it’ll be a good few degrees warmer than the surroundings. Does that preclude the possibility of condensation altogether? Of course not, but it would have to be a really quick swing from cold to hot-and-humid for anything serious to form due to your equipment staying colder than the dew point.
The bigger problem I faced was equipment ending cold-bugged. I have a setup very similar to yours and some drives would not start after being too cold for too long. I insulated the cabinet and put some ESP8266-controlled fans in there. It stays well above freezing now in the winter and cools itself appropriately in the summer.
The one thing I can’t control easily is humidity. A friend of mine tried running some server equipment in a damp basement and that caused a very high failure rate. It was noncondensing, but just the damp air was enough to kill a couple of components. Aside from the odd rain storm, I get nothing that high plus the insulated cabinet helps as the warm interior reduces the relative humidity (as temp goes up, so does the air’s ability to carry water and hence relative humidity goes down for the same chunk of air at different temperatures).