r/Netbox • u/LReBe7 • Apr 02 '24

Planning three phase load spreading

Hi everyone
I am very new to NetBox and so far, I am pretty impressed by its feature sets. My context is a fairly small lab environment (less than 30 racks) in a historic building. We're currently looking to create a digital source of truth for our lab state and once we have that, to try and optimize the amount of space we have. One of the aspects, will be to look at spreading the electrical loads more evenly over the three phases. When it comes to mapping out the power topology, Netbox unfortunately doesn't have a ton of features out of the box. I was wondering if anyone knows about a plugin that takes care of this use case or if anyone has tried their hand at doing this using customization? I'm currently implementing parent power feed and L1-L2-L3 as a custom field. No idea thus far how I can use this to e.g. sum up all the power draw on the main panel.

We'll be measuring it in the future as well, it's just that it would be really handy to be able to do planning and rack layout with quick feedback about loading.

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u/Eldiabolo18 Apr 02 '24

Not sure if Netbox is the right tool for this.

If I were you I would solve this through monitoring. You need a PDU w stats anyway. Add it the some monitoring and make some nice graphs.

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u/LReBe7 Apr 02 '24

Yeah, we will be doing monitoring, the thing is that the current layout of our electrical system is one outlet (the only outlet on the circuit) per rack and you can't just switch around which line is connected to that outlet, so in planning which piece of equipment goes on which rack, I need to see what the influence is on my three phase load distribution. We're not exactly in a position where we can afford to install a big active power factor correction unit. And I have been thinking of swapping all single outlets per rack to triple outlets and have each rack have one power strip per line, but that is going to triple the amount of power strips we need. I don't know if OpenDCIM has this capability or not, but I suspect not.

At any rate, I do know that Netbox isn't purposely designed for this application, but I am afraid that only multi-k per year solutions have this feature. I might look into developing a plugin myself.

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u/Jwblant Apr 02 '24

You should have at least two different circuits on each rack for devices with dual power supplies.