@(&(&(@(&!% Power Company!

So, I get out of the shower at about 7:15 AM Thursday morning, to be greeted by my work cell phone sounding like I hit the jackpot on a casino slot machine. Power blip at work, with 27 buildings worth of UPS's sending traps for the loss of power and subsequent restoration. Spent about an hour in the morning acking the alarms.

So, I'm riding in the passenger seat of the Mighty Dodge the next day on Friday morning at 7:45 AM (being chauffeured to work), and my work cell phone told me that I hit the jackpot again! Yup, another power blip, but this one actually fried one of the server room UPS's and whacked a SAN connected to said power protection. Spent the day cleaning up from that mess, and left a co-worker to replace the UPS after hours last night. (Everything in the server room has at least two power supplies, and is connected to more than one UPS so they can tolerate a single UPS failure.)

So, I'm in a group meeting at work this morning (yes, it is Saturday), because attendance is mandatory for supporting a huge annual event. Everyone laughed at me when I suggested that they carry a flashlight, because the power was guaranteed to drop by 8:00 AM. Sure enough, the power blipped again...as predicted...at 7:59:21. Of course, the last laugh was on the power company, because whatever they sent down the line today *fried* my desktop UPS in a cloud of magic smoke!

So, I'm sitting at my desk right now, flashlight in hand, with my computer plugged into an unconditioned power strip because it was all that I could scrape up, watching QoS data on a screen that could be blank at the whim of the power company. This should come as no surprise, since Thomas Edison personally strung some of the power lines still in use here today.....

I was not aware that VAG had acquired Dodge. Is that an approved vehicle at RT?

It's a F'ing Fiat.

But given that it's a diesel with a 6-speed manual, I'll allow it to be mentioned here.

Since I don't work for RT, they don't have a say in my vehicle choice. However, this one is on their approved vehicle list:



The picture was taken in 2001 (pre-ban), but you can see the RT approval decal on the rear fender.....

I miss your old tag line: "Ugly green heated seats".

Yeah, they sure were ugly! What was VW thinking putting those luxury seats in every 1995 GTI?!?!?

On the bright side, the power is still on with only an hour or so left in the big show.....

Uwe said:

It's a F'ing Fiat.

But given that it's a diesel with a 6-speed manual, I'll allow it to be mentioned here.

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It's NOT a Fiat. The door jam sticker clearly says that it's a Daimler product! Heck, the G56 manual transmission in the Mighty Dodge is produced to this day by Mercedes-Benz.....

To add insult to injury, I had to endure an extra 15 minutes of traffic on my 10-mile trip home because VP Biden was in town for the West Point graduation. Whenever someone from the executive branch visits, they close roads and block entrance/exit ramps to let the VIP motorcade through.

I didn't think about the bright side until I got home. If I was not forced to be in the office today when that power surge hit, the failed unit could very well have started a fire and burned my desk since the batteries were still live and feeding what was left of the inverter.....

Yeah, what is it with UPSes going down in a cloud of smoke!? Same thing happened to us a couple time with Tripp Lite units a few years ago. Yanping's unit even took down a breaker.

We have actually logged more downtimes at work caused by UPS failures than power failures taking the equipment down. I absolutely loathe APC UPS's, but the people signing the requisitions keep on buying them. Back in the 1990's, it was a crap shoot for whether the UPS would power back on following a complete battery discharge during a power failure. Great for equipment in remote wiring closets (NOT!), not knowing if someone needs to touch any of them when the lights come back on.

Starting in 2010, I insisted on buying double-conversion APC units for all of our equipment racks and wiring closets. It basically is a battery charger connected to a battery, and then continuously runs the inverter off of the battery to power the equipment. No transfer relay, and the battery acts as additional filtering. I don't care about the trees dying because of the extra power it uses to do AC->DC->AC conversions in dozens of these units.

Back in 2011, I was investigating why a 2,200K unit went offline in one of our PBX rooms. When I hit the power switch to turn it back on, the best way to describe what happened was a plasma bubble coming out of the front vents and knocking my 20+ stones ass clear across the floor. I yanked the twist-lock from the wall, but it was still running on battery with the front panel damaged and blowing smoke out of every opening. Thankfully, someone else grabbed a broom to knock the front battery cover off and pull the battery plug.

The desktop unit that went today was the last of the pre-Schneider APC units that we have, and I lovingly cared for it for years because it never tried to kill me. I fed it new batteries every two years, and even had the serial management port hooked up to my computer to monitor the health. It was in 100% perfect operating condition according to it's own on-board diagnostics up until the moment that the power glitch hit it.

We did buy a few Tripp-Lite rack UPS's for comparison testing, and not one of them made it out of warranty without being serviced. You would think that *somebody* could make a reliable commercial UPS unit, but I guess that's asking for too much.....

Eric said:

Yeah, what is it with UPSes going down in a cloud of smoke!?

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They really do create more problems than they solve. I wish the manufacturers would realise that the power to a UPS is, by its nature, going to be a little 'dirty' - and make the front end a little bit more robust. This was a bad day for rail travel in the UK...

In thinking about it overnight, each rack-mount UPS unit costs us about $450/year over what I'm finding to be a 5-year service life including one battery change.

Since many of the critical locations also have backup generators, we certainly don't need a long run time from these UPS units. I wonder what the cost of going "old school" and installing a flywheel backup/surge system is compared to going with a UPS? I also wonder what the service life is of a flywheel in constant rotation?

For those who have never seen the old school power filtering solution, they use grid power to turn an electric motor, which in turn spins a flywheel. Connected to the other side of the flywheel is a generator, which harvests the kinetic energy to power the protected equipment. The mass of the flywheel acts like a surge filter, since a utility spike/dip will be absorbed by the mass of the flywheel. When the power drops, there's enough energy in the mass of the flywheel to keep powering the load until a generator can start and take over driving the incoming motor for grid power.....

vreihen said:

I wonder what the cost of going "old school" and installing a flywheel backup/surge system is compared to going with a UPS?

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As with so much else, it depends on the quality of the materials, components, and design of the equipment. If you build it using the kinds of standards that old-school phones were built to (the kind you could only rent, not buy from the Ma Bell), it's gonna cost a lot, but have a very long service life. Of course, one could build a UPS to those kinds of standards as well, but it would cost more than most people are willing to pay, especially when others offer lesser quality stuff for a lower price.

I still have one of those old phones, and it will probably be the only thing working after an EMP because Ma Bell built them like tanks! Funny that we're talking about Ma Bell on this topic, since I believe their solution to emergency power was running all of their equipment off of DC battery piles with no inverters or fancy electronics to fail.

I was looking at some info on flywheels, and the 21st century iteration uses floating magnetic bearings and a vacuum pump to reduce friction. I also saw a vendor selling super capacitor UPS units, which are only meant to bridge the gap between grid power failure and a standby generator coming online. They claim a 10-year plus lifetime, which of course I have a hard time believing.....

In the Hospital I work in, we've made a point of having dual UPS's (online 24/7) running the ICU, AND have non-UPS power points...... that way, when the power fails, one UPS blows up, and the generator kicks, the items plugged into the failed UPS can be moved to non-UPS power points :-)

The last 20KV unit under Theatres lasted nearly 2 years (we'd just ordered 200-odd replacement batteries!), when it went bang, because "management" decided that it didn't need clean, cool air - a giant fan sucking road dust and fumes in from the street was fine.... replacement has AC, AND filtered positive pressure air supply :-)

Funny story. The 208V rack-mount power distribution units that APC sells for us poor North Americans uses a different plug into the UPS than the UPS uses to connect to wall power. When the UPS blows, you can't move the load to the wall outlet without an adapter plug!!!!!

vreihen said:

angry @(&(&(@(&!% Power Company! .

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vreihen: I worked for a power company for many years when I was a fresh faced graduate- long ago! Although there are many difference between the practices of our power supply companies and those over there in the far north, I'm sure that I'm correct in saying that there is nothing wrong with the voltage/current waveform of the stuff that power authorities buy from the generation companies (I'm not certain how US distribution businesses purchase their energy)! The real problem is how the downstream customer treats the perfectly formed sine-wave that was originally made available by the power company!! We often commented on the need for a "frequency impedance" penalty to be levied on those customers that had no respect for the purity of the 50 Hz waveform !!

Don

DV52 said:

We often commented on the need for a "frequency impedance" penalty to be levied on those customers that had no respect for the purity of the 50 Hz waveform !!

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That's part of the problem. North America uses 60 Hz waveforms, and our power grid makes an excellent reference oscillator for clocks.

We have huge transmission grids here, with power companies buying from whoever on the grid has the cheapest power at the moment. A lot of our electricity comes from the environmentally-friendly hydroelectric plants about 400 miles away at Niagara Falls. At the distribution level, they are starting to put in smart switches at substations and larger connection points. When a car knocks down a utility pole, the lights flicker/surge a few seconds and then the system finds an alternate route to get the electrons flowing again.

This problem keeps popping up every few months where there are spikes at the same time every day for a week or so, and then they stop. My desktop UPS used to trip on at exactly 8:52 AM every morning for over a month, and the logs it generated showed the problem repeating like clockwork. Then, for no reason, it stops one day. I was thinking that it was someone powering up a huge piece of factory equipment or the nearby hospital throwing the switch on their ancient MRI machine, but for all I know it could be the power company switching grid providers to save a few pennies and not being perfectly in sync when they do the cut. Is matching phase frequency even something that the power companies worry about when switching grid sources or re-routing power?????

Oh, it bears mentioning that my house is served by the same power company. There's a *major* grid interconnect point figuratively at the other end of our road, and our power here is squeaky clean. Maybe they are using fresher electrons?????

Time to go back to the big UPS flywheel Art...........
I recommend a hydroelectric motor which turns the big flywheel by hydrostatic pump and then genny.