About half a year ago I bought a used UPS. It didn’t have enough output to power my main PC, but it’s perfect for my home server and network.
Starting on Christmas eve and continuing even today, my neighbourhood has been getting intermittent brownouts. It’s only affecting one phase (house is on a three-phase 240V connection), which happens to be the one powering my network (also all of the light fixtures, stupid Soviet house), and the UPS works beautifully. I didn’t lose any of my services even once. Without it, I would probably be reinstalling Proxmox and praying to the RAID gods to restore my hard drives.
“It pays for itself as soon as it is needed” is proven true once again.
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I have all the expensive and/or critical (e.g. boiler) devices behind double conversion UPSes - those are the safest ones and also help with brownouts. They are cheap if you get them second hand and buy new batteries. 2000-3000VA units can be found for as little as 150 euro + batteries.
When I lived in Pittsburgh we had daily brownouts, I lived in 3 different rentals in three different neighborhoods and almost every day my lights would dim then brighten. It killed so many cheap Walmart LEDs, but I never lost any computer equipment because I had a UPS for every device. I wouldn’t get them from the garbage room at the university, and occasionally buy them from thrift stores and replace the batteries.
I’ve done some bopping around looking at electrical systems for RVs and vandwelling and such, and it shocked me how cheap it is to buy some lithium batteries and solar panels. A couple of years ago, a 200 amp hour battery was like $2000 per battery, but it’s gotten way cheaper, really fast and you can assemble for yourself a little emergency setup for the price of a high-end PC or two. Which if you think of it, is crazy, as in the past those sorts of things only happened for like big businesses or whatever. Today, the main ‘cost’ is the time sink and research cost because there’s not a lot of experts out there yet even though the hardware is available, so you have to do a lot of research and be careful as hell because electricity is complicated and dangerous.
(You can also get one of the jackery systems or whatever from Costco or Amazon, which is more ‘plug and play’, but is also more expensive overall for the amount of electrical storage you get.)
You won’t be able to completely replace the strength and reliability of a normal grid connection, and you don’t want to use it to produce heating or cooling (because heating and cooling suck power like whoa), but for brownouts and blackouts and storms it’s pretty doable to put together a little battery system and some panels and stuff that will at least keep electronics powered. If you understand how much electricity you can store and how much your appliances draw, you can even (carefully) cook on it or keep a refrigerator going.
Like, it’s possible to do this in a RV or van, where space is limited, so if you have a house you could totally do a backup battery system that tops itself off of the grid, then is available if/when the grid goes down for X amount of days at Y amount of draw.
Dude, fuck yeah! Thats awesome!
If you don’t mind my asking, is three phase power common for residential buildings where you live? I didn’t realize that was a thing anywhere in the world
It’s more common than you think. Most European households use split three-phase power. The grid provides three live wires (50Hz AC phase-shifted by 120°) and a neutral. The voltage between any live wire and the neutral is around 230V, and between any two lives is ~380-400V. Residential power circuits are connected to a live and neutral wire, each of the circuits being fed by a different phase, with separate safety devices (ground fault interruptors and such).
North American residential power is different, but also uses split phases. The transformer that connects the residence to the grid steps the voltage down to 240V, but has a center tap that is used as the neutral wire, resulting in two 120V phases 180° apart from each other. 120V goes to small appliance circuits, and 240V feeds large appliances like HVAC and electric stoves. You can listen to Brown Jacket Man explain it in detail.
Another important note is that transformers supply entire neighbourhoods (dozens or hundreds of households) instead of individual residences.
Oh shit, thats super cool, I know a bit about the US power grid since that’s where I live, but all I knew about the European power grid is that like most of the world they have 240V AC instead of 120 like most outlets provide here in the US (even though we technically also have 240v and just use it for like ovens and electric dryer machines)
Thank you for teaching me stuff, I had no idea three phase power is so common elsewhere!
(Also fuck yeah, technology connections, I love that guy!)
Except Norway, where 3-phase IT is still dominant. TN is only being built in newly established buildings/areas.
IT being phase/phase = 230V, with no neutral wire.
Upside is it being more robust to ground faults, but you lose 11/22 kW possibility on EV chargers. 7,2 kW is max (32A @ 230V).Looking forward to it being gone, tbh…
In Belgium it’s still widely deployed. Two other downsides are the risk of electrocution with monopolar switches (can’t rely on a light switch, not that you ever should but lots of people think “no light = no zappy zappies” then get a nasty surprise), and compatibility issues with some 3-phase appliances that aren’t designed to be hooked up without a neutral because they were not sold in an area where 3x230 is common.
Not sure where OP lives but in Belgium it’s common and I think the default for new installations.
In Finland 3 phase 380V also comes to pretty much every house
Nice. 15 years ago I lost half a days work (self employed) when power blipped. Bought a UPS that week. The power losses have been infrequent, but brown out and over volting have happened quite a lot. It is cheap insurance against disaster.
Last power loss was a loud bang and a flash outside during a rainy day, then UPS kicking in. A crow landed on an electrical transformer and got vaporized.
I have a 12V 200Ah battery sitting outside in the rain next to my car parking spot. I got it for free (It used to belong to the emergency power bank of a ship, but it was swapped out). Now it’s mine “just in case”. It has saved me a couple of Icy mornings when my car needs that extra boost. I also ran my routers and switches on it once during a power outage, as I have a 12V to 230V inverter available. 200Ah goes surprisingly long.
