Topic: Adding a UPS to the station...

[Intheswamp]

Ok, we had a power outage at the house today....had a rather severe thunderstorm come through and put a large area of the county out of power.  Of course my station went down with the rest of the grid during the storm.  Thankfully we have a very good electric coop and some guys that are downright crazy to get out in the weather they do to fix things...I'm sure glad they're crazy!   They got the power back up inside of a couple of hours...and the station came back up.

The VP2 console has batteries in it so it kept running.  The old laptop's battery is still pretty good and will give me around three hours of power so it kept on chugging along.  But...the router and modem when down as they are plugged into AC.  I have an old (but never used) APC Power Pro 500 still in the box and a fresh 7ah battery for it.  I'm going to set it up and hook the modem and router to it so that when the power goes down the station can keep going hopefully long enough for the power company to get the power back on.  It will let my wife access the internet with her laptop, too, to see what's going on (the power company has a map that shows the outages and where the crews are).

Anyhow, another minor project to attend to...
Ed

[JACK10562]

Your UPS should give you a few solid hours of modem and router run-time, but depending on how your internet connection itself is powered may have a bearing on the outcome. Hybrid Cable systems need local power for node and line amps and while some have built in backup battery power, those may only work for a few hours before crashing during an extended outage.

Maybe Bluetooth tethering to your cellphone can keep your internet going....

 

[Intheswamp]

We're out in the country and have DSL.  I must say that since I got ahold of the right linesman and he fixed our line going to the switching station we've pretty well had trouble-free internet.  Even when the phones go out the Internet stays up!  The last time the telco system went down due to dead batteries was after Hurricane Opal and power was out for a week or so...the batteries did go down in 3-4 days, though.  Hours?...I think the systems around here are more robust than that as we've had some 8-10 hour power outages over the last few years (substation meltdown on one occasion) and the phones did not fail during those times.  I think their batteries will outlast my laptop's batteries for sure.   Now I'm thinking of a deep cycle battery and inverter for the laptop....see what you started! 

Those are good thoughts, Jack, that make me think of different aspects of the situation...thanks!

Ed

[Aardvark]

I live in the city and we have DSL,  40mbps down and 5 up.  The  power sometimes flickers and the modem goes down and it is a pain to have to wait for it to reset itself and recognize the DSL / Internet.

I have always used a UPS, have them on all my machines.   A couple of months ago , my granddaughter flopped her shoes on the ups and shorted it out. I have no idea how it did but it happened. so I went out and bout a Cyberpower 1000 aver unit and have all my important stuff (external drives, cpu, ) and now the modem.  I think having an UPS is equal to also having external harddrives  for data and things and cloud storage plus a kick -ass AV/Firewall as well.

[Intheswamp]

Well, this morning I woke up to no internet.   I knew I shouldn't have bragged on the service out here in the boonies.  Ah well, I've got a service call in and it's *supposed* to be fixed by 7pm tonight.<groan>.

[BigOkie]

Well, this morning I woke up to no internet.   I knew I shouldn't have bragged on the service out here in the boonies.  Ah well, I've got a service call in and it's *supposed* to be fixed by 7pm tonight.<groan>.

Don't feel bad.  I haven't had power now for the second day.  It's not often I wake up and look forward to coming in to work.   

[Intheswamp]

No competition for "no power"....I concede!!!    Usually our extended power outages come from hurricanes, even though we're 80-90 miles from the coast...the bad ones blow right on in. 

Looks like they got the internet back on early this afternoon.

Ed