Well that explains a lot. Mains power in the Netherlands costs around 23 eurocents per kWhr, that's about US$ 0.32 per kWhr (I'm not to sure what the Euro is worth these days). Last year my house(hold) used 5400 kWhr, having two teenage daughters who can't close a door behind them nor turn a light off doesn't help either :-) Two years ago with more equipment turned on we (well my hobby :) used nearly 8000 kWh. So we're doing a lot better now. STill no reason to run heavy iron like AS1200's or a DS20E. The emulated area router for area 44 is nice though! At least I can see 'my' area in the list on hecnet.eu.. Hans -----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- Van: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] Namens Dave McGuire Verzonden: dinsdag, april 2012 20:46 Aan: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Onderwerp: Re: [HECnet] Area 44 status On 04/10/2012 02:32 PM, H Vlems wrote: Is electricity free where you live ??? Hardly, but I just moved to a place where it costs MUCH less than where I used to live. Besides, the DS10L pulls almost no power, and the VAX I'm considering running full-time is a 4000VLC, which pulls even less. As for the rest, remember that I am constructing a museum here. I'd love to have a couple of machines up and running, the extra mains power bill would be a little too much for my wallet. A DS10L isn't that bad probably but even a VAXstation 4000-VLC adds about 20 euro's to the monthly power bill. Let alone running a couple of power hungry Alpha Server 1200's and Digital Server 5305's! My power bill here (remember this is a 14,000 square foot commercial building) is about $275/mo. About $190 of that is my production network, which I use for work as well as everything else. In the summer with air conditioning, that will go up, but we're not sure how much yet as we've just recently moved into this building. Contrast that to what I had been paying, $700/mo in the summer, $550/mo in the winter living in Florida, running air conditioning 24x7x265. We are MUCH happier here in Pennsylvania. (and plus there's actual work to be found, which there isn't in Florida!) My production network currently consists of: Cisco 7200 VXR router Cisco Catalyst 3548XL switch Cisco Catalyst 3508XL switch Sun V480 server (quad UltraSPARC III+), sixteen drives HP DL585 VMware host (quad Opteron), four drives Sun Netra V100 (DNS server) 80-slot SDLT tape library for backups But also note that this network is how I make a living, maintain communication with the outside world, and provide services for friends and some other companies that I want to support. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA