On Tue, 16 January 2001, Jeff Cours wrote:

It might be possible to come up with some sort of average power draw, but Electrical Engineers really hate to give out numbers like that because people base their designs on them instead of on the worst case power draw, and then when something fries the EE winds up getting the blame. That's why most engineering disciplines derate components and allow a safety margin, which I suspect is where the fuse rating comes from.

They may hate to give out this information, but any piece of equipment with a NEBS level 3 rating already has this information. I'm not asking for vendors to do the full, burn the box, NEBS testing. But having the power drain data sheet would be very useful. This is really a customer demand issue. If customers started demanding vendors supply a full NEBS-like space and power planning data sheet, we would get the information. But customers don't, so we don't. While this may be a deliberate decision by customers, who would rather save the money on equipment and spend a bit more on "extra" electrical infrastructure, I don't think so. I suspect its because customers have never known they could ask for such a thing.