Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
SO....it's 110F and our power just went out. The neighborhood app indicates that others are out too. Dammit. Power co says it "should be" restored at 11:30PM tonight--in 5.5 hours from now. In our neck of the woods, this is the hottest time of the day, not noon. S**T!
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And this is one reason why various folks I know invested in portable generators, precisely to provide power when there was an outage like that.
One old friend had a project underway to improve UPSes. The folks this was aimed at had lots of things that needed steadily reliable power. The whole point of a UPS is two fold: that the power is regulated and consistent, free of surges and fades that make electronics do double back flips, and that if power goes out, the UPS switches to battery backup. If you are lucky, the batteries are enough to keep things running till the power company fixes the outage. If you
aren't lucky, the UPS can remotely gracefully shut stuff down, so that when power is restored you can restart things without potential loss of data caused caused by power going away at an inopportune moment.
But UPS systems were all over the map on how they worked and how easy they were to monitor and administer. He was looking at a three part solution. One part was easily replaceable batteries, as some UPS systems make replacing them very hard indeed. (Like, ship the unit back to the manufacturer.) Another part was an interface to mains power that would monitor it. A third was a smart controller based on something like a Raspberry Pi that would be what the user used to monitor and control things, which would connect to the UPS, get status from it, and let the user send commands to it like "Initiate shutdown on connected systems because the power isn't coming back soon enough for the batteries to substitute. My guess, which he more or less confirmed, was that the majority of folks might only need the smart controller.
It went on hiatus because he was a software guy, and the hardware guys familiar with power system engineering who had expressed interest were otherwise occupied.
But he also went out and got a portable generator. Power in his PA suburb was pretty reliable, but he needed always up systems and Internet connections to do what he did, so even an occasional outage was a major problem. I don't recall precisely what he did to make sure the generator would be fired up and substitute when there was an outage. (What happens if you aren't home at the time? Nothing good...)
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Dennis