Much has been done.

The spider problem has been gone for months now. That's no big deal. What is, however, is the fact that Fragwell Labs, while once intended to receive a makeover, is going to be a barn for my server farm during the cold months.

With that in mind, I need more power. While the lab already has a 20A circuit, it has suffered some regrettable limitations due to the way I set the wiring up. When we moved in, the lab was wired with power via a 20A drop from the breaker panel to a piece of Romex and then to a junction box with a GFCI inside. From there, a grounded 12AWG extension cord was plugged into the box, run under the house and out to the lab. That was fine, for a bit, until I was heating the lab with a bunch of idling computers last winter to try to keep it at a temperature where I could work comfortably and ended up blowing the "15A" breaker on my ten year old power strip. This tripped the GFCI so I had to pull the skirting and push the reset button. Not easy with a foot of snow in my way. I have better power strips now, but there's another problem.

Directly inside the shop, the extension cord has a three-way splitter plugged into it. This splitter has a 13A breaker on it and it's very touchy, especially when the ambient temperature is high as is common during Utah summers. Running my lab computer, lighting, portable A/C unit and laser printer is a recipe for a breaker trip. Not fair.

But there's a way around it. This weekend, I run a second 115VAC line off the other side of the phase. While I can't go directly from a single outlet to a power strip and use all 20A since code is such that no single outlet can use more than 80% of the ampacity of a circuit, I can get a tw0-way splitter and use the full ampacity of both lines. While that circuit won't be enough during the summer months where cooling is a necessity, it will be more than enough for winter, even with the server farm and laser printer, assuming I use the printer all that much.

The compute cluster is meant to be powered by a 230VAC 15A circuit when fully loaded. With the 80% rule in effect, that's 12A peak they plan for. I still have 8A left on each rail, which would be enough for the AC unit and my laser printer to coexist.

I have nine compute nodes. Eight work. The cluster power rating looks at ten nodes.