I asked the next-door neighbour on return, but it would be really cool to have a gizmo to plug into the mains, then light an LED if the power goes out, e.g. in a storm. A more sophisticated version would also say how long the power was out, e.g. 1 LED = 1 hour, 2 LEDs 2 hours and so on. Obviously, it would need a battery to keep the LEDs lighted if the power went off. Does something like this exist already? (Yes, I've Googled!)
You're over thinking the problem:
As long as the outage isn't exactly 12 hours, natch.
A mains operated analogue clock or, as those are quite rare these days, one of these:
Simply compare time shown when you get home with the correct time.
Colin Bignell
Our microwave oven clock showing a row of zeros does the job nicely.
Coupled with the microwave, the oven, and other clocks in the house being zeroed, my intruder alarm logs whenever the power goes off, and when it comes back again, if i want to see how long it was off for.
After a power outage the oven says "STOP". And the central heating timer will be the amount behind the power was off for. I sometimes use this to see how long a job on the electrics took and say to SWMBO "look, replacing x only took y minutes!". And get a condescending "that's nice dear" in return.
My LED clock/ alarm hasn't got the backup battery fitted, so when I get home, if it's flashing, I know when the power last came back on. If you have a mechanical timeswitch anywhere, it will be running slow by the total length of the power cuts since it was last corrected. A mechanical timeswitch set to "always on" feeding power to the clock is a Heath Robinson approach to having both items of information in the same area.
On Monday 06 January 2014 18:05 wrote in uk.d-i-y:
If you can find a nice old proper mains clock with a synchronous motor, that will tell you how long the power has been out...
On Monday 06 January 2014 18:08 Scott M wrote in uk.d-i-y:
Beat me to it!
Available in most large supermarkets. They're sold as 24 hour mechanical timers, although the face *can* be a little hard to read, being so small.
Relay, LED, RC, reset pushswitch
NT
small raspberry pi that makes a log entry every minute, and has ntp.
look for the boot log to find when it booted and the last entry in the log from the timer....
Any cooker with a mains powered digital clock or for that matter most cheap mains powered digital clocks that lack a standby battery. The result is modulo 1 day but usually more than good enough.
The modern digital teasmade is particularly annoying in this respect.
:-)
Any decent UPS with management facilities allows you to view the history of the supply.
I've got a mains alarm clock that does all this for you :-)
For the unsophisticated version you could use a non latching* plug in RCD adapter which will trip on loss of power. Some have a little indicator window which changes colour when they have been tripped while on others a button will be further out.
G.Harman
Just received an APC UPS this morning. Perfect timing!
The smaller ones rely on the connected host PC to do the logging...
This particular 6-socket one is for the TV, PVR etc. I had a similar one some years ago in the US, and it kept its own memory, and told the PC what had happened when it was plugged in to it. I haven't set this one up yet, so have no idea what it does for history.
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