OT: Battery backup

[Brian K. White]

On 2/25/2011 5:21 PM, C Day wrote:
>
> Does anyone use natural gas powered, automatic start-up, stand-by
> generator rather than gasoline powered?

We do.

No worries about running out, indefinite run-tim, no worries about 
gellied gas or varnished carbuerators surprising you when you need the 
thing to "just work" "RIGHT NOW". It has an automatic timer that runs it 
for 15 minutes or so once a week.

It's done it's job perfectly several times too.

It is of course reliant on the gas line.

A gasoline engine is subject to all those issues that might result in it 
not working when you need it, but one thing it has in it's favor is you 
are not limited to any single source of fuel. If the gas can is empty 
you can go get more. If one gas station closes there are uncountable 
others you can go to. It might be a lot of inconvenient work, but it's 
_possible_ to just keep driving all around and bringing back more gas 
from wherever you need to.

Wheras the natural gas line you never have to refill or maintain or 
unclog or clean or worry about water etc... you are dependant on that 
single line from the utility. If it breaks then there is no way you can 
supply fuel any other way to make the engine run. You can't hook up a 
propane tank, they are entirely different fuels with entirely different 
properties. They do make engines with special carbs and regulators that 
allow you to run on both natural or lp, but that's a bit exotic.

In our case we reasoned that the built-in reliability of no gasoline to 
possibly gum up or get water in it, and the built-in unlimited run time 
outweighed the single fuel source risk. It's like this, if there was a 
disaster that managed to take out both the electric AND the gas at the 
same time, it was probably such a major event that the servers would be 
the least of our worries and we'll just switch to off site servers 
already running elsewhere. In any event it would have probably taken out 
all the net connections so once again it wouldn't matter if the servers 
stayed up.

-- 
bkw