Running a Home-Office Through a UPS 141
mwagner_00 asks: "After spending lots of money and time, I now have an office in my home. My wife and I both have computers (mine is a high powered gaming rig), and I also have a workbench where I work on other people's PCs. I have a web/email server as well. I would like to protect the investment by running the room's power through a UPS. I have a APC 3000NET that my workplace was going to throw out. The only thing it needs is a good set of batteries. Has anyone tried something like this before? Basically I want to find the breaker for the room, and after the breaker, run the power through the UPS and back out to the room. Is the UPS that I have sufficient to run a whole small office?"
Just go PV (Score:3, Interesting)
See http://www.dsireusa.org/ [dsireusa.org] for more info on your local photo volatile power system incentives
-Rick
Re:18 amps (Score:5, Interesting)
If the power suddenly goes out, do you really want the lights in the room simultaneously drawing extra power from the UPS and hiding from you a pretty good clue that the power just went out?
This is surely not the way a UPS meant to be used. I've certainly never seen one hooked up this way.
UPS? uninterruptable?? sure (Score:4, Interesting)
For whatever reason, over the last 10 years, I have seen more power failures being caused by a UPS then being handled properly by one.
The idea seems to be good and usefull, but so far reality tells me that those devices do not have the kind of reliability that is needed.
One of my customers has their entire computer room wired up to a HUGE UPS, and has a few smaller ones in place for very important servers. The big UPS is supposed to keep them running for as long as power lasts, the small ones are to allow those servers to properly shutdown when power runs out on the main UPS.
In the last month, they had 2 major failures of the main UPS, resulting in a substantial amount of downtime. They cannot remember the last failure of mains power (I do, and it is a few years ago now)
My own company used to have a very nice IBM AS/400 with UPS (one made specifically for this machine), which failed during the one power failure we have had in the last couple of years here, not to mention it deciding to just switch off a few times over the years.
Another one of my customers runs a bunch of servers with redundant power supplies where each power supply has its own UPS. That setup sees to work a lot better already.
To me the story seems pretty simple:
Car Batteries (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just go PV (Score:3, Interesting)
No longer true. current theoretical limits put the power generation at 30% of the power received by the sun. And life spans of 20+ years. New thin film technology is allowing PV cells to be made cheaper and easier, and in much better applications. Gone are the huge 6 foot panels. Now you can get a PV sheet that can be rolled up and put in a backpack for power on low impact camping trips. Companies like UniSolar produce integrate PV roofing. Which are roll out solar power shingles, looks just like a normal roof, only a little shinier. If you are replacing your roof anyways, gov funding will pick up most of the extra costs and the power savings will pay off the remainder well before the end of it's life cycle.
"huge freaking magnets that you're trying to *gently* set into a wheel with opposing poles dangerously nearby. hope you didn't want that hand..."
They're not that big. There was a story posted here a few months about about building your own 30' tower. The problem is, in order to harness the really strong winds, you need to get 30m+ off the ground. We have a new wind farm being built in Wisconsin, each turnbine is 130' tall, with 100' blades if I recall correctly. so at it's highest point, the blade tip is 230' above the ground. Great for wind generation, but they're freaking huge. Nebraska is the place to do it though, huge flat plans with tons of wind. If Nebraska had the infrastructure, enough wind farms could be built to power the entire western half of the US.
-Rick
My Whole-Home UPS Solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes.
I, too, had a surplus UPS about the size of yours. When I
was in my apartment, it sat in the same room as my computers.
The UPS was loud, ugly and produced lots of heat. (Much like
a girl I used to date... but that's an another story for
another day.) It protected my computer equipment but not my
TiVo or home stereo equipment because they were in another
room. So, I had to have a seperate UPS for them.
When I bought a house, I didn't want UPSes spread all over
the place nor did I want the heat or sound inside the house.
So, I put the UPS in the garage and then wired UPS outlets
where I needed them. I have a quad-outlet in the office for all
our computer equipment. I have a quad-outlet in the living room
for the TiVo, stereo and TV. My cordless phone and answering
machine also plug into a UPS outlet.
For nearly five years, this setup has worked great. Every
two or three years, I have to replace the two batteries ($90).
Other than that, it has been great.
Plus, I have disaster-recovery outlets spread throughout
my house. When last year's hurricanes knocked out power to
my house, I was able to plug the UPS into our small generator.
I didn't run the computers or television (but did keep the
TiVo online so I wouldn't miss my shows) but I was able to
keep some lights on without having extension cords pulled all
over the house.
> I want to find the breaker for the room, and after the
> breaker, run the power through the UPS and back out
If I were you, I'd run a new circuit. You never really
know what outlets and appliances are where. When I moved
in, the toaster's outlet in the kitchen was on the same
circuit as the outlet on the front porch where I plugged
in my hedge clippers.
I'm sure there is more on your office circuit than
you know about. It is best to start clean. Plus, electrical
work is really easy if you have attic or basement access.
Matt
Separate UPS's per power supply, yes! (Score:3, Interesting)
In the telecomm infrastructure, everything runs from a DC battery bank, which is maintained by rectifiers. (Or you could say it runs from rectifiers, backed up by batteries. Semantics.) All the equipment has 2 power supplies, and is always fed from two separate DC inputs, known as A and B. In very small (remote equipment hut) installations, sometimes A and B are both fed from the same battery bank, but in most buildings, there are two strings of batteries. You could concievably blow a main fuse on one side, and the whole office would run from the other. (Everything's fused high enough that it can draw all its power from one side or the other, but in normal use, they split the load evenly.)
The DC infrastructure makes telco central offices ideally suited to solar-electric installations, since the inverter is a large part of the cost of a residential photovoltaic installation. (I don't know why we don't see this more often.)
Back to servers. I've got very little experience with redundant power supplies in the PC world. Is the APM/ACPI driver aware that one power supply has failed? Suppose you had one power supply plugged into the "house power" feed, and the other into a small "personal" UPS. Could software notice the failure and begin an orderly shutdown, or would the small UPS have to tell the server, via USB or RS232, about the fact that it's now running on battery?