I live in a part of the world where powercuts are pretty frequent. 1 per day is normal. They last between 1 and 8 hours. A day without powercuts feels like a special occasion.
My machine is powered by a desktop ups which is terrible. It is only supposed to power everything for a few minutes to shutdown safely. But it is cheap and I don’t know much about other affordable alternatives.
How do you folks who self host at home deal with powercuts? Any recommendations? 8 hours of uptime from a ups sounds almost impossible or totally unaffordable to me.
Ah. Texas.
I am totally out of the loop. Why is Texas’s power grid that bad right now?
Not just the GOP, but privatization of public goods and services. Profit motive is a terrible way to run a power grid.
I’m honestly dumbfounded how that can happen in the US. Here in Germany power outages are rare, maybe a few minutes in 8 years.
I really don’t get how something so important is left so broken in the biggest economy on earth.
I’m not trying to be mean.
Also not trying to be mean, but energy in the US is generally very cheap ($0.12/kwh where I am). With more regulation of the market, the reliability would probably increase but so would the price! (I see this happen first hand since I work in the industry)
Few reasons. First, the United States is huge. Texas alone is twice the size of Germany. Second, the U.S. has three main power grids. The left half, the right half, and Texas. It’s a little more complex than that, but the important part is that Texas is on its own. Third, Texas hates people. They let companies deregulate to hell and back, even at the expense of its residents.
The combination of being on its own power grid, deregulating that power grid and the companies that maintain it, and not taking proper precautions to protect its residents all leads to a less-than-reliable power grid when it gets hit with any non-standard weather. Texas especially needs to prepare for climate change, but things could definitely be going better…
Multiply your server wattage by 8 hours. That’s how much battery you need. It’s probably not going to be a cheap investment.
The alternative would be to keep your ups and invest in a generator you can kick on if there is a power cut, but if it’s every day, that might get rough. Technology connections figured out a build it yourself solution a few years ago https://youtu.be/1q4dUt1yK0g?si=8WOTue9-zGghWlxY
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/1q4dUt1yK0g?si=8WOTue9-zGghWlxY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I’d multiply by 10-12 hours to account for losses in the DC-AC conversion.
are there no dc-dc PSUs (or technically just voltage regulators I guess) to relace a PSU with available? That way OP could avoid part of the Ac->Dc->Ac->Dc-conversion related losses he would have with a battery-backup.
Where are you from my friend? Why do you actually need server running if you have no electricity at home? Your internet is also down right? Dont you need to just find how to shutdown safely when outage happens? Or do you have mobile/sattelite internet as a backup?
I use candles btw 🕯️
Not OP but my fiber optic Internet is not on the same power grid as the rest of my house. I’ve got a battery backup on my routers and modem for exactly this reason. I’ve got a UPS to handle a power outage into automatic graceful shutdown at 33% remaining.
Germany.
I don’t. Can’t remember a power outage ever except for shorting our connection box :)
Besides that only some internet outages of our ISP but that is also very rare today.
Edit: At work we sell 750VAh to our customers which are usually very small in demand and workload
I live in a part of the world where powercuts are pretty frequent.
Texas?
