The first step in reducing your electric bill or become more energy efficient is to understand how your servers use their energy and finding out how you can maximize the power efficiency of your IT deployment.

This document will outline how we bill for electrical use by our customers and describe what the numbers mean for you, so that you can make a more informed decision on your IT equipment purchases.

Unit of Measurement For Your Power Usage

Traditionally in the past, we used Ampere (amps) as the unit of measurement for customer power usage on colocation circuits. Recently however, we have switched our power measurement procedures to use Watts and Kilo Watt-Hour (kWh) as our primary units of measurement when calculating the power load requirement and consumption for customer equipments.

kWh stands for Kilowatt Hour and is the standard metric used by most electrical utility companies worldwide to bill customers on their electricity use.

Most colocation providers bill their customers by using a "blanket-charging" method, where they measure the amount of Amps drawn. If customer's server draws more power, an overload fee is charged. The problem with this method is that it never takes into account for the fact that servers typically take higher amount of power when they start up and lower amount during off-peak times when CPU and related hardware are sitting idle.

TowardEX believes that it is unfair for the customer when colocation provider charges them with the maximum amount of Amps drawn by measuring them at a particular time of their choosing. As a result, we use the electrical industry standard of Watt-Hour to monitor the actual Watt-by-Watt energy consumption. It is like having your own electricity meter installed on your server for precise and accurate energy consumption reporting.

If your server draws about 1 Amp of power in 120 Volts which is 120 Watts, then let us assume that this server takes exactly 120 Watts for the whole month and is always turned on, never turned off.

With that assumption, your server would take about 87 to 90 kWh of power in one calendar month. Let's take a deeper look below.

A device drawing 120 Watts (0.12 kilowatt), turned on only for one hour in a month uses 0.12 kWh. But, if that device was to be turned on constantly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the entire month, and if that device constantly drew exactly 120 Watts during the whole time, it then uses approximately 87.84 kWh. How? Because, in a typical month there is about 732 hours (averaging out to 30.5 days, multiplied by 24 hours). So multiply 0.12 kWh by 732 Hours and you have net amount of 87.84 kWh used to bill the customer for electricity use.

Note: Remember that the numbers provided here are for estimates and should NOT be taken as exact measurement for billing purposes. The actual billing is conducted by electricity meters that track and record your real kWh in real time, but the numbers here are provided as an example to give you an estimated trajectory of your electrical bill given the provided circumstances. They should not be construed as exact figure for actual billing purposes.

A Friendly Reminder: Did you know that Redundant Power and Remote Reboot are provided to you for FREE?

Each RU you have purchased above comes with two (2) power outlets from diverse distribution sources, so please make sure that have redundant power supplies in your servers to take advantage of diverse redundant power. Most colocation providers charge you an extra monthly fee for this service but we are including it free of charge for every RU leased to a customer.

Also please note that Remote Reboot capability is availble for you to remotely power cycle your server over the Internet. This is provided free of charge.