Electric And AC Sizing For New Building Housing PDP-8s and PDP-11s

Hi Todd, Do you need three-phase? Depending on where you are, you may have a hard time talking your PoCo into running three-phase to a private residence. If you have a lot of three-phase gear, might be better to rent some old industrial space or something ;) You also have the option of phase converters and MG sets like the home machine shop folks but those can get pricey. Will the new building have its own drop, or will it be fed from your home?? A lot of guys will tell you if you are building a shop from scratch, just go and put 200A service in and be done with it. The price difference is not big to put in 100A service versus 200A service from scratch... basically just the price difference on the breaker box. It will cost you a lot more to rip out and replace once you have whatever gauge wiring run everywhere, the wallboard is up, it's painted, etc. Consider, how much of this stuff you will actually run concurrently for any length of time... Electric rates are only going to increase as time goes on. This old stuff, it's just chock full of low-efficiency linear power supplies and tons of 5V TTL so it sucks a lot of electricity even when idle. So, for purposes of determining power consumption and how much cooling you will require, I'd just run with the maximum figure printed on the boilerplate. Basically consider every watt that goes in will be dissipated as heat. 1 watt = 3.41 BTU/h. Best, Sean On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 4:23 PM, Todd Goodman <tsg at bonedaddy.net> wrote: