House/city got hit by a 115 mph wind gust, taking out power to most of the city last night.
Knocked down all of my trees, wrecked havoc on the city. Messed up roofs everywhere, and most importantly, no power for anyone!
https://www.koco.com/article/oklahoma-severe-storms-weather-tornado-hail-saturday/44233131
My city/utility estimates it may take up to a week to get power restored. But, thankfully, I have spent a lot of time preparing for this event.
As- my MAIN house batteries were only charged up to 50/60% when the wind hit- AND, I had a misconfiguration on my primary inverter causing them to shutdown at 20% (Rather then 10%), the first night, the entire house ran on battery from 11pm up to 7:20am. This includes, running the A/C, running my rack of servers. All of it.
I have a constant, 500w load from my servers. I have a optiplex micros in my kubernetes farm, I have a r730xd pushing 256g of ram, 32c/64t, Tesla P2 GPU, and a whopping 130TB of raw storage (before redundancy).
So- at 7:20am, the main inverter shuts down due to hitting its battery shut off limit. Of course, this means, my A/C and fan shuts off, causing me to wake up pretty quickly. The majority of the house is out- but, not my rack!
My rack is still plugged into my homemade 2.4Kwh UPS I built a few years back.
So, after getting up, grabbing my coffee, I went ahead and plugged in the generator, which got everything turned back on until the sun came back out. Once the sun came out, the steady 3-5kwh of solar PV power kept everything running, and put its extra juice back into the batteries for later.
During the day- the entire house, and rack of servers was able to run off of pure sunshine without issue.
Around an hour or ago, when the sunlight went away, I went ahead and plugged in the generator to get the batteries topped off for another night without grid power.
Home assistant automation yells at me when the batteries are full, to tell me to go and turn off the generator. When the batteries get low, it yells at me to go start the generator. (Literally- it talks to me via TTS).
That being said, I have 5 gals of gas in the generator, another 5 gals on standby. And, can always go and get more if needed. But- that should be enough to keep my entire lab running for the rest of the week. … between generator power, and PV/Solar energy.
If- you are interested in an overview of how my solar setup works, its all documented here:
https://static.xtremeownage.com/pages/Projects/Solar-Project/
Edit- also, if https://xtremeownage.com/ and https://lemmyonline.com/ are still working- my Lab is still powered.
Holy crap that’s awesome! I’d be lucky to get 1 minute out of my trash Cyberpower UPS once the power goes out. Thanks for the informative post OP! And for the inspiration!
I have a few Cyberpower 1500AVRs laying around here- Every one of them has taken a dump on me! That was the inspiration behind be just building my own damn UPS lol.
And, It has outlasted every single APC and Cyberpower around here so far!
I can see why. Mine has gone through 3 battery changes so far, and I’m certain the one in it currently has failed already. Had a brownout a couple weeks ago and wouldn’t you guess, the UPS died immediately.
Looked at your UPS build and damn, that’s a monster!
I’d love to trash this Cyberpower unit and put together my own now, hmm, now how to convince the wife …
Sounds like you have spent a bit more time and money than I have
Thanks for sharing this, is extremely interesting
I just saw your power consumption. 1500kWh/m. That is insane!
Also, cool setup!
Some months are better. Some are worse. With the heat wave going on currently, its going to be much worse.
That’s amazing. I appreciate the priorities.
Is your isp /network up? Or do you fail over to lte ?
My ISP actually never dropped- in-ground fiber, and they have a proper generator backup at their datacenter down the road.
Wow thats nice
Wow, impressed! What type of battery do you use for your homemade UPS?
It has a 12v LiFePO4. If- I did the project again, I would have went with a 48v battery.
But- I didn’t know then, what I do know now.
Do you have a write-up of why you’d go with 48v instead of 12v?
Not a full blown write-up- but-
higher voltage means less amps, which means you can run smaller gauge wire.
This- in turn, also means many of the components and electronics are smaller/cheaper too, as they don’t need to be built as heavy to handle the amperage.
Awesome documentation! Wish I had the skills to build that UPS. I don’t trust myself to not die or burn the house down.
Sorry this happened to you, but thanks for sharing. I wish I could get some solar stuff but I live in the woods so it’d be pointless. On the other hand all the shade keeps my house a lot cooler.
Sadly, it won’t work for everyone. And- in most cases, a generator would be a better financial decision.
But, I still say, I have been really enjoying learning all about it, experimenting, etc.
