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THE DEATH&TAXES PROTOCOL :
30A breaker, 10AWG branch line, and a NEMA L6-30R outlet (240V, 30A, locking). Cheap used datacenter PDU with a NEMA L6-30P plug. "Good for a solid 5.76KW."
We're looking at setting up 2-3 server racks worth of GPU rigs, and powering them all off 220. Each rack will be using ~8kW (possible more), which will be 35+A if we use 220.
So lets say we use 9kW per rack. We'll just do two of your setups? 6x 30A 220 breakers. 10ga wire run ~100ft to our room, and terminate to 6x L6-30R outlets. 2x Compaq 24A PDUs with L6-30R plugs per rack. Then each PDU will power 3 rigs, with 3 of
these, and 3 of
these. Each rig will use an ATX PSU, and a custom server PSU.
The problem I see is that the breaker is 30A, but is being limited by the PDU to 24A, which if run at 80% load is only ~20A. Is it a better idea to install a single 50A 220 breaker per rack, run 8awg wire to 2x L6-30P, and then run both of the 24A PDUs per rack to those? The actual draw through the PDUs wouldn't change, would still be at ~20A each, but now you've got 8awg wire carrying 40A to a 50A breaker, rather than 2x 10awg carrying 20A each to 2x 30A breakers. Does this make sense?
Although I suppose if we did that, we're really limited to 40A per rack. If we went with the 2x 30A, we could upgrade the 2x 24A PDUs with 4x 16A PDUs. As long as each of the 16A PDUs were kept below 13A, the draw per breaker would be ~25A, and the total draw per rack could be increased to 52A, or 11kW.
So if we're only pulling 8-9kW per rack, we could get away with a 50A breaker and 2x 24A PDUs? But if we wanted to pull more, splitting it up between multiple breakers would give us more headroom?
I also realize that we're going to have to run another breaker for our AC equipment, but that's a topic for another day. And I'm not really an electrician, I'm just trying to figure this all out. Any suggestions welcome!