In light of recent events I am wondering if it´s wise to prepare for a possible power outage.
A few days ago there was a short blackout in our street. Well, there wasn´t any electricity available for more then 2 hours. It wasn´t so short after all.
My desktop PC was running at the time and when the electricity came back it was already night and so I took a closer look at it
only the next day.
There were a lot of things to take care of. I needed 4 afternoons to get everything fixed. I´m a bit slow in dealing with things like that.
The incident got me thinking: do you prepare for a power outage
And if so, in what way?
Do you perhaps make use of an uninterruptible power supply unit (UPS)?
A UPS would give you a small (3-4 hours) window to shut things down in an orderly way. If your power system is flaky, it’s probably worth the investment.
I don’t have one, partly because our system is very reliable and partly because my essential data is always elsewhere.
Absolutely I do! Each computer has a battery backup. Plus, the router, wireless access point, and LAN switches.
We live in a rural location, at the end of a long line from a substation.
Our power blinks out enough that they have probably saved us from data corruption grief.
And on occasion, the house lights have brightened during thunderstorms. They kicked into action more than once on those brief overvoltage (surge!) occasions. (This problem disappeared when we installed a good whole house surge protector.)
If the power drops while you’re updating your OS, that can result in an unbootable system.
Hmm, I wonder.
It´s been years since the last power outage happened, apart from then incident a few days ago, of course.
Normally the power grid is pretty stable.
But there´s construction work going on in the neighbourhood at present. A new house is being built.
I guess the power outage occurred due to that.
That´s one of my concerns. I was of the opinion they don´t last very long. Perhaps the situation has gotten better in the meantime… .
You seem to have quite a lot of devices hooked up.
With me it´s just a desktop PC, monitor and a hub with a power supply of its own.
There´s also a laptop, but as it has a battery of its own as a fallback option, it doesn´t necessarily have to be connected to the UPS, I think.
We have a similar situation, on the end of a long rural line and it is a bad lightening area.
We have MOV’s on the switchboard, but they only protect the active and neutral lines.
As it is possible for devices to be zapped through the earth line if lightening strikes the ground nearby, we also have plugin surge protectors that protect all 3 lines.
So, the only extra thing a UPS would do for me is give a few minutes of battery power to allow a graceful shutdown.
I would want to use a UPS in addition to the plugin surge protector boards, but you say putting 2 levels of protection in series is a bad idea. Why?
Do you know whether the surge protection in a UPS protects the earth line? Without knowing that, I would not be keen to use a UPS on its own.
I think @Rosika 's situation is different. She does not seem to have a lightening strike risk.
I do have a UPS on my main home computer system and a few peripherals on the desk. Last year (I think) I got a new one. The older one had not been replaced for a good 10 years and it developed some problem it seemed.
For me it’s not so much about having a battery to run without power or do a controlled shutdown as it is protecting the devices from damage. Mine have both been a line interactive model where it prevents problems with surges, spikes, brown outs, and such. I credit the UPS with helping my tower last so long. I don’t know the year I got it, but it’s a first-generation Core i7, so that’s at least 15 years, I think.
I also have a thing plugged into an outlet called a Ting. It connects to my WiFi and notifies me of any electrical issues. My insurance company supplied it.
I used to keep a smallish UPS to run my file server / NAS… I still have it somewhere…
But - it got so annoying pipping and beeping all the time - I stopped using it. I could never figure out how to disable those horrible alerts…
I get maybe 3-4 power outages or brownouts a year…
I just weather them…
Never caused any damage - my NAS boots up just fine after… That’s the only machine I have running with mechanical HDDs… Touch wood - WD Blue 4 TB drives… All show as healthy - been in place since late 2018 I think - or maybe 2019…
The whole point of a UPS (consumer grade) is that it should automate shutting stuff down cleanly - but with today’s connected world - and multiple IoT devices in a household - who’s got time to do that (automate) but people like us “hobbyists”… Even the industrial scale UPS in customer owned computer rooms can’t keep uptime for more than 30 minutes or so (and in my experience - FAR LESS). Big data centres have UPS and generators - so if they lose mains power from the electricity grid, they can keep running on UPS while the generators fire up.
The UPS I had supplied about 15 minutes of power to a desktop PC - that’s enough to soldier through a brownout - but - not enough to keep uptime for a blackout…
Sheeze - I can remember spending a WHOLE day doing “fsck” on hard drives in Sun Sparc servers running Solaris after a power outage… Horrible stuff… I offered to write them some shell scripts to shutdown on a signal from UPS - but they weren’t interested - they’d rather pay me to slave away doing manual fsck on hard drives all day (in single user mode).
It runs my server (O-droid), the router, the switch, and the modem for approx. 25 minutes, if the power is cut. Those devices I want to run 24/7, if possible, they draw approx. 30W together.
For desktops I don’t have such a thing, and don’t even plan, but I guess it would run my desktop for 3…5 minutes, not very long, but well enough for gracefully shut down.
The powerline itself is very reliable here, so the power outages were caused by ourselves via latching the fuse. That means when my wife starts the whashing machine, the clothes dryer, the dishwasher the same time, and fills the kettle jug to make a tea, that latches the fuse, hence the power is cut
I wanted to prevent my server to go down on such events, and that UPS works well for that.
Do you know if it surge-protects the earth wire?
That is of critical interest to people in lightening zones.
We had one lightening strike 50m from the house . It zapped the hot water system through the copper supply pipe which was in the ground… caused a leak.
Our neighbour had a direct lightening hit on the earth rod outside their house. It melted their switchboard.
Earth protection is vital here.
I also worry that all surge protectors only work while there is power. Maybe the UPS ones with a battery always have power. Do you know?
Power dropouts and lightening strikes tend to occur together here.
It is interesting that turning off a power point only disconnects the active wire… the neutral and earth wires remain connected. You need to pull the power plug out to be safe.
Seems to have been a very good and sturdy make and model. Congratulations on that.
That´s an interesting point.
I was wondering: What could a sudden loss of power do to the hardware?
Or is it rather the scenario of power being restored after a blackout that you´re thinking about?
That might be more critical without any surge protection, I guess.
Yes, I am of your opinion as well.
The two partitions that weren´t affected by the blackout I suffered were root and home, both of which were ext3-formatted.
The 3rd data partition was still ext2-formatted and it was this one that I had to work on to get things right again.
After that I converted it to ext3. Lesson learned.
That´s an interesting question, Neville.
I´d very much like to know the answer to it, too.
A brownout is a reduction in voltage, without complete loss of power. It can damage electronics.
A blackout is total loss of power. The main danger from a blackout is the power surge when the power comes on again.
thanks a lot for the explanation. I never knew that.
What on earth may trigger a brownout, I wonder.
So a blackout seems less critical than a brownout?
Because a surge protector can protect you from damages when power comes back.
We have 3 wires:
Lead (usually colored black or brown) : on it travels the 230V power, it’s better not to handshake with it
Neutral (usually colored blue) : its potential usually equals to ground (earth wire)
Protective earth (always colored striped green & yellow) : its potential is the local ground / earth.
We have a 8m long electrically good connecting pole driven into the ground, and in the house the protective earth is connected to that pole. Then the neutral is connected to it again.
Gas pipe that caomes from the street is connected too, and waterpipe should be as well, I just could not do it, as the waterpipes are plastic.
I think it is important, that there’s no loop in the electrical network in our house, everything is connected following a “star point” topology.
Maybe I word it wrong again, I’ll draw a schematic, that would make it clear.
I think that MGE device surge protects both neutral and lead, as when I plug into the connector on the wall, both wires could be the lead. The sure 0V common point is the protective earth, I think it is used for surge protection, but I made no measures to check it.
So I’m not sure.
I’m not sure of that either, but AFAIK different passive elements are used for surge protecting. So that should work without power.
We already survived here big storms, with many lighnings, but nothing wrong happened.
It has 6 power connections, 3 of them are surge protected “only”.
I plugged my desktop and attached peripherals in it, as it’s there, so if it adds some security, then let’s use it… but I don’t really care…
3 of the connections are battery-backed, and this is my main use for it.
Edit:
One thing to mention: this MGE device is totally silent. Whenever power gets cut, I hear a relay to click once in it, and silent inverter-like humming starts.
I can hear this only while being within 30cm of the device.
While running from battery, it beeps every 5 seconds, that beep is quite loud, I can hear it anywhere in the house.
