It is not expensive, nor is it highly technical. It's not like we're factoring in latency and crosstalk...
Read a quick howto, cruise into Home Depot and grab some legos off the shelf. Far easier to figure out than executing "hello world" without domain expertise.
Residential electrical is dangerous. Maybe you electrocute yourself. Maybe you cause a fire 5 years down the line. Maybe you cause a fire for the next owner because you didn't know to protect the wire with a metal plate so they drill into it.
Having said that, 2 4090s will run you aroud $5,000, not counting any of the surrounding system. At that cost point, hireing an electritian would not be that big of an expense relativly speaking.
Also, if you are at the point where you need to add a circut for power, you might need to seriously consider cooling, which could potentially be another side quest.
Re: cooling; I have an AC vent directed on the setup, plus planned out in-out in the most optimal way possible to maximize cooling. I have installed like 20 more fans since taking these pictures :D
If you screw it up and need to file a claim, insurance can’t deny the claim based solely on the fact that you performed the work yourself, even if you’re not a certified electrician/plumber/whatever.
What you don't want to do is have an unlicensed friend work on your home, and vice versa. There are no legal protections, and the insurance companies absolutely will go after you/your friend for damages.
Edit: sorry this applies to owned property, not if you’re renting
There should be an easy/reliable way to channel "waste heat" from something like this to your hot water system.
Actually, 4 or 5 kW continuous is a lot more than most domestic hot water services need. So in my usual manner of overcomplicating simple ideas, now I want to use the waste heat to run a boiler driving a steam engine, perhaps to directly mechanically run your air conditioning or heat pump compressor.
These aren't power requirements that are insurmountable. They would get pricey though and I wish my rig for computing would use something around .1kW under load...
Using the heat from PCs would be nice. I guess most just use them as electrical heaters right now.
The instinct to not touch something that you don't yet deeply understand is very much an engineer's instinct. Any engineer worthy of the title has often spent weeks carefully designing a system to take care of the hundreds of edge cases that weren't apparent at a quick glance. Once you've done that once (much less dozens of times) you have a healthy respect for the complexity that usually lurks below the surface, and you're loathe to confidently insert yourself confidently into an unfamiliar domain that has a whole engineering discipline dedicated to it. You understand that those engineers are employed full time for a reason.
The attitude you describe is one that's useful in a lot of cases and may even be correct for this particular application (though I'm personally leery of it), but if confidently injecting yourself into territory you don't know well is what being an "engineer" means to you, that's a sad commentary on the state of software engineering today.
Some old serial ports had 12V and a high max current. The DIY things you attached here were prone to kill your mainboard.
Voltage/current is either 0 or 1. Anything higher kills software developers instantly.
That being said, it's still very easy not to kill yourself with 120/230V: just shut down the power before touching anything.
If you know nothing about basic electric work or principles, sure - spend the $500 to have an electrician add a 30 or 50A 220V outlet near your electric service panel. Totally reasonable to do as it is indeed dangerous to touch things you don’t understand.
It’s far less complex and less dangerous than adding an EV charge point to your garage which seems to be quite common for this crowd. This is the same (less, since you typically have a lot more flexibility on where to locate the outlet and likely don’t need to pull through walls) complexity as adding a drop for an electric stove.
Where the “home electric hackers” typically tend to get in trouble is doing stuff like adding their own generator connection points and not properly doing interlocks and all that fun stuff.
If you can replace your own light switches and wall receptacles you are just one step away from adding an additional branch circuit. Lots of good learning material out there on the subject these days as well!
As a hobby, I restore pinball machines. A modern one is extremely careful about how it uses power, limiting wall current to a small, normally-sealed section of the machine. And even so, it automatically disables the lower-voltage internals the moment you open the coin door. A 1960s machine, by contrast, may not have a ground at all. It may have an unpolarized plug, and it will run wall current all over the place, including the coin door, one of the flippers, and a mess of relays.
In the pinball community, you'll find two basic attitudes toward this. One is people treating electrical safety about as seriously as the people who design the modern machines. The others is people who think anybody who worries about a little wall current are all pussies who don't have the balls to work on anything and should just man up and not worry about a little 120V jolt.
The truth is that most people here are not engineers of any sort. We're software developers. We're used to working in situations where safety and rigor basically don't matter, where you have to just cowboy ahead and try shit. And that's fine, because control-z is right there. I've met people who bring that attitude to household electrical work, and they're fucking dangerous. I know one guy, quite a smart one, who did a lot of his own electrical work based on manliness and arrogance, and once the inspector caught up with him, he immediately pulled the guy's meter and wouldn't let him connect up to the grid again until a real electrician had straightened it all out.
It's true that this stuff is not that hard to learn if you study it. But an architect friend likes to say that the building code is written in blood, meaning that much of it is there because confident dumbasses managed to kill enough people that they had to add a new rule. If people are prepared to learn the rules and appreciate why they're there, I'm all for it. But if they do it coming from a place of proving that they're not "so afraid of residential power", that's a terrible way to approach it.
