ups Unreliable Power in Eastern Kentucky

[Gerowen]

Not a support question, just sharing my experience, and demonstrating why anybody who wants to run a home server absolutely, positively should have an UPS.

 

Here in eastern Kentucky we have Kentucky Power.  In some respects we're very fortunate.  I've got symmetric gigabit fiber right to my house, I live on a large piece of land out in the woods with basically nobody around, so plenty of privacy.

 

But, the power from Kentucky Power is very unreliable.  We've probably got 99%+ up-time on the power, but we have at least a couple of extended power outages every year, and very frequent "flickers" where all you really see is maybe the lights dim or flicker for a fraction of a second.

 

I've had this UPS for years now and replaced the battery once already.  When I first replaced the battery the estimated (and actual) runtime with this exact same hardware setup was a little over an hour.  Now it's down to less than half that,   Since November 14th apcupsd on my home server has logged 45 "Power failure" events where the power either shut off, or at the very least, flickered enough to trigger a momentary transfer from mains power to the UPS.

 

What "might" turn out to be good news is, Kentucky Power is being sold off to a different company and is being investigated for over-charging people after they straight up admitted that they literally "guessed" at the fuel cost and over-estimated, and are having to credit our bills, but honestly, the high bills would be a little easier to stomach if it wasn't so darn unreliable.

 

I'm just glad my UPS monitoring works so well.  The server powers itself down, turns itself back on, sends notifications to my Minecraft server, etc.  The main storage drives are paired in software RAID 5 with an encrypted data partition, and contain a lot of sensitive information, so even though I have an offline backup, I would rather not have to use it because of AEP/KY Power's crappy service triggering a corruption during one of those brown-out/flicker moments.

 

The two latest "extended" outages listed in the mobile app were planned outages for maintenance of overhead lines, but still annoying since we got zero notice ahead of time.

 

 

[sub68]

as someone that convinced my parents to UPS the internet closet and my pc.

We have less problems since then.

[Gerowen]

7 minutes ago, sub68 said:

as someone that convinced my parents to UPS the internet closet and my pc.

We have less problems since then.

They really help a lot.  We've got the one on the server that also powers the router and ISP modem, one on the living room television, a small one on the nightstand in our bedroom so we can still turn on a lamp if the power goes out, one in each kid's room to protect their TVs and such, one on the CB radio base station and one on our refrigerator.  The biggest benefit they offer us isn't necessarily the continued runtime when power goes out, because if it's an "outage" it usually outlasts the UPS, but what they help a lot with is all those moments where it just dips or goes off for a second or two and comes right back on.  Flashes like that can be really hard on things like fridges if the compressor happens to be running when it happens.  My mom has had to give away the contents of her deep freeze multiple times due to power flashes killing the compressor or blowing a fuse or something.

Edited May 24, 2022 by Gerowen
forgot to mention the cb radio ups

[sub68]

32 minutes ago, Gerowen said:

The biggest benefit they offer us isn't necessarily the continued runtime when power goes out, because if it's an "outage" it usually outlasts the UPS, but what they help a lot with is all those moments where it just dips or goes off for a second or two and comes right back on.

Yeah I agree, mine does 30 min, 180watt PSU, with 2 monitors...

[Donut417]

Detroit Edison stated they might have to start rolling blackouts this year do the demand. I do have a UPS on my NAS, Modem and Router. Might need to get another one for my Plex server. If the blackouts get bad, might need to invest in a generator or something to that degree.