Power Up

This year I staffed the UK biggest ever LAN (to date, circa August 2013). just over 3000 people brought computers and another few thousand turned up each day for the Minecraft UK Expo which ran in tandem to the LAN.

Safe to say we went all out making this happen, here's my view from the back of the stage manning the long camera shot. There's 1000 seats and behind and to the sides it was standing room only, probably another 700 or more at least.

However, one of the more interesting things that most people don't see is after the LAN, all of the power distribution boards were stacked together. One of the guys counted roughly 5000 Amps of supply, although not everything was used on every board, that's still quite a bit and I haven't actually counted it myself. Certainly a solid number 2 on all time biggest power projects I've worked on.

Banana for scale.

Someone said that when we do the event, the power grid are alerted so they can manage the supply effectively. 3000 PCs suddenly browning out makes for unhappy gamers.