Mains outage alarm/logger

What exactly are you trying to achieve Chris?

If (say) you want to know if the power goes off on a freezer whilst you're out, and how long the temp is outside of limits, then there are cheap products to do this. Search on "freezer alarm".

There are commercial power monitoring products around - see

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so I suppose there must be a simple consumer equiv - but I can't find one!

An off-the-wall thought is the UPS I run this PC from to protect it from outages, has an in built event log so I know that the last time it intervened was for 4 seconds at 21:46:06 on 11th November last year! Snags are:

If you're out, (PC off etc.) there might be no alarm for you to hear when you get back. So you'd need something else to tell you the power had gone off to prompt you to check the UPS. e.g. one of those old radio alarm clocks with a PP3 battery backup which could be removed so you'd know *something* had happened from its flashing display, AND possibly how long since the power was last restored if the clock is the type that starts again rather than just sitting at 00:00 waiting for you to set it.

It looks like the event log on mine (an APC) only stores the number of times the power has been off and the date/time of the LAST power event, so you might not get a very accurate picture if your mains was bouncing up and down.

Midge.