I'm looking for a good way.

[[v]@bans]

I'm looking for a good way to check how much my Xserves are costing me. I scrounged up some old Xseves to dick around with (lucky I guess) but I know being 1U racks they can be power hungry. What is a good way to guesstimate how much it can cost to run them. What considerations do I have to factor in. Also any resource on these would be cool.

 

[DatHak512]

Pick up a Kill-A-Watt meter and that will tell you how much power your machines are consuming.
Of course, if you want to be really precise, you'll have to figure that whatever heat the machines produce will be adding to your normal cooling bill (or subtracting from your normal heating bill) because your HVAC unit will have to remove all that extra heat from your building. But that's probably just splitting hairs...

Or, if you don't want to buy anything, i would try to find the operating manual or the tech specs for the kind of Apple Xserve that you have, and just make a ballpark estimate by taking, say 60% of their peak power consumption, and using your electrical company's cost of a KWh to figure out how much you're spending on electricity.

Luck,
_nick

 

[[v]@bans]

Is it generally a safe ball park to assume that, 60%? I am gonna check out Kill-A-Watt thogh..