OT: Battery backup

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011, Bob Rasmussen wrote:
>On Fri, 25 Feb 2011, Bill Campbell wrote:
>
>> deterioriation from lack of use.  We get enough power failures
>> here so I rarely have to run it just to charge the battery.
>
>You ARE talking about Mercer Island, right? I didn't know it was that wild 
>and wooly there.

Yup.  Mercer Island, AKA Poverty Rock, AKA Mercedes Island.
We're on the south end which is still pretty heavily wooded, and
most power/phone/cable lines are above ground.  Puget Sound
Energy and QWest make some attempts at keeping them cut back
around their lines, but they still have problems.

So far this has been a good year as we have only had one 24+ hour
power outage so far when we had a storm around last Thanksgiving.
With all the hype about bad winters and El Nina last fall, I
expected to spend a lot of time in the dark.

The biggest problem here is wind storms.  A couple of weeks ago
when it got very windy, I put all the computers on generator
before visiting friends in West Seattle so I wouldn't have to
worry about power here.  When I know it's going to be very windy
at night, I often go to generator since I might not wake up after
an outage in time to get things on the generator before the UPSs
run out of juice.  FWIW, I plug the UPSs into the generator so
they act as a buffer, and stay fully charged.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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