The UPS here earns its keep ...
20 minute outage plus 10 minute outage two days ago Two outages of a few seconds this February Two outages of a few seconds last December 15 minute outage last September One outage of a few seconds last July One outage of a few seconds last May One outage of a few seconds last April One outage of a few seconds last March Log doesn't go back earlier than last February
The win10 laptop PC I have on 24x7 monitoring my aquarium and stuff uses about £10 per year, less if it remembers to turn the screen off.
The Rpi running the remote USB sensors is probably using as much. Maybe I should move the laptop and avoid the USB over wireless? All the software runs on win10 as well as the Rpi. It doesn't all run on the Rpi though.
Must be old to be that slow. Have you thought about getting a new one that does it in 30 seconds? Look at how much time it would save in a year, maybe ten minutes if you reboot as often as my laptop.
Ditto, night time base load minimum is nearer 400 W here.
Are you bitcoin mining or something?
The UPS, I'm not sure what six we'd need on the lab for 40-50 PCs, all I know is we aren't getting one most liklly due to cost.
The 219 servers are mostly protected by UPSs last year we had a major problem as the local electricity board cut throguh a cable the UPS switched in and there was a fire in the server room. Another incident was when there was a flood in a server room.
What and why does it monitor an aquarium ? I used to have 3 aquariums even the shops don't use laptops for such a thing, and laptops don't seem the be st option either. This sort of thing would be ideal for a pi or arduino pro ject we ran a greenhouse equivalent a few years ago for student projects.
what sort of software is required to run or monitor an aquarium ?
That is surprisingly unreliable are you on old copper overhead wires or something? I live in a rural setting and we only really lose power these days when a tree falls through the line and sometimes not even then. It is usually in the stormiest of weather than power goes down here.
Last serious time was when the bulk milk tanker mated with a power pole on a frosty morning and gouged out 10m of expensive holly hedge.
We get the odd scheduled power cut for tree maintenance in summer too.
I might miss the odd few seconds power gap here and there.
Chances are just a couple of those are responsible for much of it. Older TVs seem particularly bad about standby. Modern stuff is mostly If I leave a PC or laptop running overnight, can't get below 150W
A PC running and all bets are off. Mine is quite frugal when idle.
Probably similar to me..
three NAS boxes router TV recorder trickle fan in bathroom several chargers alarm fridge freezer PIRs lamp on drive CCTV recorder and cameras Aquarium an echo or two
Sensors that measure light, temp, NO3, Ph, etc.
Stuff thats written to use the sensors, it runs on windows and uploads to a web site and sends SMS messages if something goes wrong.
If you have a few hundred quids worth of fish you might want to know when things are going wrong well before they die.
No, underground wired to and from the substation (150m up the road) not sure how far away the nearest overhead section is.
The brief ones that I notice are generally distant lightning triggered, no idea about the long one from two days ago ... thinking about it there were three WPD landrovers parked a mile or so away when I went out after the first cut, and when I got back there'd been the second one.
My money's on the UPS (cold-war standard APC SU2200) but with nearly one power interruption a month, it's not really a luxury now that I mainly work from home.
No they're fine, I do wish the bedroom one didn't "whistle" when it's in standby though, or that my bat-hearing wasn't so acute.
Correct, the power brick is 4W by itself, and the radio as a whole is 9W when off, and 11W when on quiet.
I have about 400W on PCs alone!
400 W might just keep one GPU card mining. B-)
Lets see: UPS, HP Micro Server, 16 Port unmanaged Giga bit switch, 8 port managed PoE Gigabit switch, Load balancing router, ADSL modem, VOIP/POTS/DECT base, 3 handset chargers, 2 AP's, weather station, blitzortung (PoE), webcam (PoE), CH/HW system (Two programmers, two Wireless Stat Rx, solar controller, stove controller (two, Raspberry Pi Zero based one in development), half a dozen mains interlinked smokes(*), two emergency lights(*), dozen or more wall warts plugged in powered up but attached kit off or standby (mostly SMPSU's), couple of lights, freezer, fridge/freezer, aquarium, TV and BD in standby, microwave with flashing colon, E7 immersion controller, Pi running XMBC (screws up the CEC if you turn it off),
(*) I suspect the smokes and emergency lights account for the bext part of 100 W of that 400 Wminimum base load.
That's enough bollocks between Martin Brown's claim that recent plug in energy monitors are inaccurate on small sub 10W loads and only read to the nearest watt +/- 10W (true of the very first sub ten quid Machinemart/ Netto/Aldi units from over a decade ago), and this business you've just mentioned of a line interactive UPS somehow magically distorting the mains voltage waveform just by selecting a lower voltage tap on its mains transformer to restore the mains voltage back to 240v[1], so I'd like to dispel these myths.
As mentioned, it's been a good decade since useless plug in energy monitors were last miss-sold to the general public. Any current plug in energy monitors sold during the past 6 or 7 years (maybe longer) have proven to be remarkably accurate to within +/-3% of VA and Wattage readings (and, therefore of necessity, to within +/-1.5% of voltage and current readings).
They all display readings to a tenth of a watt resolution (although one model I have only does this for readings above 1W) and display to a maximum of 3120W or so (I noticed a 5 quid model on Amazon claiming it would only read to a maximum of 2998W before cutting out).
These "Plug in Energy Monitors"(aka fancy digital watt meters) have improved beyond all recognition since such devices first appeared some 15 years back. IOW, they're quite a useful measuring tool to have for checking the consumption of IT kit such as modem/routers, ethernet switches and PCs (as well as the standby power of TV sets and USB chargers).
As for your assumption, Andy, regarding the power feed to your PC not being the "sineyist of sine waves", well you're right (up to a point) but not on account of the line interactive UPS bucking the voltage with its transformer. The lack of sine wave purity originates with the mains supply itself which can best be described as a sine wave that's had its peaks neatly sliced off with the flat tops showing a slight down slope on the positive peaks and vice-versa for the negative peaks.
If you can observe the mains waveform on a proper oscilloscope (or audio captured using an audio recording app that will let you zoom in on the recorded waveform (CoolEdit Pro or Audacity) from the output of a 5 to
15vac output wallwart transformer attenuated with a resistor network down to half a volt rms or less to avoid overloading the line input of your sound card), you will be able to observe this for yourself.If you remove the mains input from the UPS whilst observing/recording the waveform on the protected side as I've just described, you will either see a horribly shaped squareish wave or else see a perfect sine wave replace the slightly distorted mains voltage waveform, depending on the quality of your UPS.
If for example, you have an APC SmartUPS, expect the quality of the "mains waveform" to improve (I believe all APC models of "SmartUPS" provide sine wave outputs). :-)
[1] Or 230v if you believe that our UK mains supply has actually been adjusted to conform to the notional 230v rating of electrical goods sold/ manufactured throughout the whole of the EC rather than left exactly as it always has been except for the change in the voltage tolerances mandated by new regulations catering for the notional 230v ratings of new appliances.
If you're using an APC SmartUPS700, you can measure the input power and calculate the PC consumption by subtracting the 20W maintainence consumption after allowing the battery pack to recover from the shock of the interruption. Half an hour or so should suffice (or else disconnect the battery pack whilst you take a wattage reading). You can hot swap the battery pack in this model - there's no difference between a fully charged battery and a disconnected battery in the maintainence consumption readings to within *less* than a tenth of a watt.
35W is a remarkably low power consumption for a desktop even allowing that the monitor may be in standby screensaver mode. My desktop idles at around 86W with the monitor taking another 30W or so and the speakers a further 4W. I tend to leave the PC on permanently. My only concession to energy saving being that I switch the monitor off before I go to bed. :-)I got a chance to measure "The Office" energy consumption last Sunday when I was testing a 1KVA Parkside inverter genset with the SmartUPS2000 currently (at long last, once more) serving the "Protected Mains Sockets" that feed said desktop, a NAS box, GBe switch and an old Linksys router acting as a WAP. With the monitor switched off, the consumption settled down to about 206W after the batteries had recovered from the brief outage incurred by the change-over to genset power.
Around about 28W of this being the maintainence consumption of the 2KVA rated UPS when fed by the 233vac genset output (it goes up to 32/33W when on the normal 240 to 245v mains supply). Not covered by the main UPS is the 10W or so consumption of the VM SH2 that resides in the basement, so all in all, a total minimum overnight consumption in the region of 220W for the IT kit alone.
The main reason I mentioned that the kill-a-watt was monitoring between UPS and PC was that I was quite surprised the power factor was under 60 and thought someone might query it being that low. The PC has a 550W PSU and was more or less idling at the time, maybe not ideal for efficiency or power factor.
It idles quiet well for a 3.6GHz 8xhyperthread xeon with 32GB and a lowish rx550 GPU, the DVB-S2 tuners drag a bit of power for the LNBs when they're in use, has its own PCIe power connector like a GPU.
That's with only the SSD in use, it has 9 SATA hard drives that I selectively dismount and spin-down (especially at night I dislike the noise).
I've never seen the PSU supply more than half its 550W, maybe at boot time with all drives spinning up.
The KVM was switched away from the tower PC to the laptop, the dock for that and the monitor do run off the UPS, but were not supplied through the kill-a-watt.
So you are mining?
I don't have any PCs that take much more than 10W while doing stuff at night. Even the i7 one doesn't use that much. They are all laptops though.
The CCTV system is probably the most power hungry as it has a few HD cameras with quite powerful IR lighting and I am not convinced the lights turn off in daylight. They are run off a couple of PoE hubs too.
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