OT: Battery backup

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011, Richard Kreiss wrote:
>Last night at about midnight the lights in the house went on and off several
>time for about 1 to 2 minutes and then at 12:15 the power went off in the
>whole community.
>
>I surmised that someone had hit a pole outside the community and this
>morning I found out I was correct.
>
>Now all of my UPS' started to beep in my office as they should.  
>
>The more interesting thing is I have been using 2 spare ups'  for my flat
>panel  TV's and cable boxes.  When the power went off, my wife was watching
>some programs she had recorded on the DVR.  She never though anything about
>the fact that she was watching her programs when all of the power was off in
>the house.  The system stayed up for 1/2 hour - that's when the power
>returned.  This was a 720Va APC SmartUPS which one of my clients had
>replaced with a new larger model and gave me.  

A half-hour power outage?  You guys are pikers.  We get week-long ones far
too frequently during the winter when the wind gets going.  No UPS smaller
than a house is going to keep things going that long.

Each of our racks has at least a 1,000VA APC SmartUPS which keep things
going until I can get things switched to generator power.

I got a 3000VA Honda generator about five years ago that provides power for
my office and three racks of computers.  It's extremely quiet, and provides
clean power.  I bought generator from Sears during the Clinton Inaugural
windstorm in 1991, but the UPSs really didn't like the power it provided.

On a related note, when we had a week-long outage in December 2009, Comcast
cable was down for that time plus another week after the power came back
on.  Think of that when thinking of switching all your voice lines to a
broadband provider.  Our QWest provided T1 and land lines never went down
during these outages.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
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