Sweet setup, what's the reason for the extreme attention to backup power? is the grid really that unreliable where you are?
I've had one unplanned power outage in the last 10 years so it seems like a crazy amount of backup to me.
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Yeah that seems kinda crazy to me too. I've lived in my current house for 8 years and the only time the power has gone out was when a vehicle crashed into one of the distribution boxes by the road. Our power and internet come from the same provider so it was a double whammy for several hours.
But I suppose it depends where you are - i worked at a place that had two independent power feeds from two different cities, massive UPSs to run the datacenter for 10 minutes and then two redundant diesel generators with several months of fuel on site. I still saw that go down twice in my time there.
When we lived in Missouri the power went out twice ish a year, sometimes more. Amazing how fragile that stuff is when nobody invests in the infrastructure for the town.
I have no way to prove it, but I'm 99.9% sure that CenterPoint Energy (Who services this grid around here) leave stuff on its last legs so it gets damaged in a hurricane, and they can claim that juicy FEMA money to fix it.
Round here it's all government run. The city runs power, water, sewer, phone, internet, trash/recycle/compost.
We've got the second fastest internet in the country (and it's free for low income people), our power gets an American Public Power Diamond rating for reliability, we're (mostly) on track for being 100% renewable power by 2030, the city captures and liquifies the methane from the sewage treatment process and uses it to run the garbage trucks (that say "Powered by You" on them) and our rates for all of that are cheaper than commercial providers.
Amazingly we still run into people who live here, know all that and still believe that the government is incapable of running anything well... it's kind of startling.
Still, that makes a bit more sense for why you have a generator and that then pretty much requires you have a UPS - so i get it.
I've had my power go out around 10 times this year. Gotta love that TX power grid
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Great setup! but is the thumbnail showing as George Takei for anyone else?
What the heck! Not for me. Got a screenshot?
I’m on a Beta Kbin app so maybe that’s why? But as far as I can tell it has nothing to do with your webpage lol
I pasted into Discord and it just shows the rack, that is so odd
Loved the UPS article itself. If you wanted to level it up one more time, you could do something like this: https://hackaday.com/2023/07/31/automatic-transfer-switch-keeps-internet-online/
It is a automatic transfer switch, so that in the case of a UPS failure, the power can be transferred to a wall outlet fast enough that you shouldn't experience an outage.
Yeah that's on my to do list, I'm looking for some ATS PDU's for cheap, like the CyberPower PDU20MHVT10AT
Like the idea of multi-room UPS. Question, once the UPS battery run out during a power outage, is there any other type of power generation (Solar, Propane or gasoline) as a backup (aware of the servers will consume more watts than it can generate)?
Ops got a diesel backup generator, says it takes 10 min to kick in if there's a power outage.
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Yes, I have a 27kw Natural Gas standby generator with an ATS. It takes 10 seconds from power failure, to it switching to generator power. So, the UPS just bridges that gap
In the extremely unlikely even the natural gas goes out, I have a 7.2kw Tri-fuel portable generator (Gasoline, NG and Propane) and I keep around 80 gallons of gasoline on hand, and I have an inlet and interlock on the main breaker, so I can switch to that if needed
I love that Verizon mounting solution! Velcro is the civilized man's duct tape!
I do wish I had some white velcro though!