Power outage

[mdlbear]

There was a power outage yesterday evening at the Starport; no harm done, but it triggered some thoughts. Here's the raw data:

  : UPS battery life on nova is under 15min.  That's miserable.  
    stargate:  107min,  5.0% of 865W = 44W  (includes DSL router, switches) 
    nova:       13min, 16.9% of 260W = 44W  Oh.  (varies down to 33)
    trantor:	70min,  9.0% of 780W = 70W
    CPAP rated at 48W, but hopefully uses less -> 30 open; 6 idle  Eeep!  
      That's maybe 3h on its XS1500 UPS.  The alarm had better wake me up!

Ok, so there are two obvious problems here. The first is that Nova, the fileserver, has a miserable uptime. That's not so bad, since the network is perfectly usable without it as long as all you want to do is surf. The other is that my CPAP, which is on the same kind of UPS as stargate (the router) has a much higher power consumption than I thought. The battery wouldn't last the night. Which means that I would probably die in my sleep if the power went out. Not so good.

There are two less obvious problems: Nova's disk took over an hour to fsck. That's a long time to boot, but not not too bad because, as I mentioned, the file server isn't all that essential in the short term. What's more of a problem is the backup drive on stargate. I really don't want my router taking half an hour to boot.

I also discovered that my wireless phone base station is on its own UPS, a 500VA APC that beeps when the power goes out. One of the thing I really like about the XS series is that you can turn the power-fail alarm off. Great in the office. Not so great for the CPAP!

So the current plan is to move the bedroom UPS into the office for Nova, and for the short term move Nova's SmartUPS 420 into the bedroom. Because it beeps. Eventually I'll want something bigger.

I also want to put the big partitions on a once-a-week unmount / fsck / remount routine. Easy. Along with that I want to move the router to a 2.25" drive (which I just happen to have sitting around) for lower power consumption. (I'd rather move the router to a solid-state drive and make the laptop drive external. But that will have to wait.)

ETA: I just found a stack of unpaid bills including this month's energy bill -- 28.2KWh/day, as opposed to 35.1 last year, so a little under a 20% improvement. (The gas bill was 63% more, but we won't go into that. yet.)

ETA: (0403) Actual measurement on the CPAP shows that it uses between 6 and 12 W in normal operation, so the XS1500 will keep it running all night, barely. That's encouraging. May keep things as they are for a while.

Comments

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I'm not so high-tech in my CPAP backup. It has a 12-volt socket; I have a marine battery I keep charged. I measured its operating current--it's good for at least two days. But then, I'm not likely to die in my sleep if the power fails. Wake up & be very irritated, yes.

[mdlbear]

Good idea. What I'm worried about is that if I don't wake up, I'll just end up rebreathing the CO2 in the hose.

[jenk]

Is your mask both nose and mouth? My CPAP has a nose mask, so I figured if the power went out I'd just breath through my mouth. (We do have a UPS for the CPAPs now.)

[mdlbear]

Just nose, but I seem to be pretty good about keeping my mouth shut, so I'm not sure how well that would work.

OTOH they make UPSs for CPAPs, and I can probably get Kaiser to help pay for one.