Mother Nature just tested my UPS

Hardware Hub PSU
1

August 29, 2016

My IT guy at work told me to get a UPS 10 years ago. Well there is a first time for everything and it was truly tested this weekend.

The one I have now is a temporary replacement because my better one died.

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We are having a typical late afternoon Ohio monster thrunderstorm. Lightning and big hail too. My cat can't remember that he didn't want to go outside 5 minutes ago.

Lightning hit right near the house and all the power went out. The PC's UPS did not skip a beat and kept the PC running until the lights came on a few seconds later. Woo Hoo!

We Interrupt this post for two days until the power comes on and the forum is back up.
8/31/2016

About 3 minutes later & Wham Thunder! Power is really out this time. For Hours. For a lot of the city. I was able to shut down the PC gracefully. Now I had a chance to perform the experiment I have preparing for 10 years to do.

I plugged a CFL bulb into the UPS for emergency blackout lighting. I used a 14W 5K color temperature bulb and it stayed on for 4 hours. I wonder if an LED bulb would last longer? Depends on the Watts I guess. The LED bulb I have is 7W so I should have used that bulb to get a lot more up time while putting out nearly as many lumens.

3 Likes
2

Cool :) there's a special kind of satisfaction from these things

also check out, there's been multiple things like this lately

http://spaceweathernews.com/

3

I guess you can call it... Natural Selection?
Cheesy jokes aside, sorry for your loss... Of power.

I'm going to hell, oh wait that's a good thing. Thank Satan I'm a Satanist.

4

Which one? Goat Boy or Sol?

1 Like
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I've got 5 or 6 around here, so my modem and switches and NAS and every machine has surge protection and battery backup, we have unstable power occasionally and rarely storms but when they do happen they're decent, 12 months ago a really big one and a near by lightning strike and i got a surge through the phone line, the one thing i didn't have surge protected was the phone line, totally fried my modem and port 1 on my main switch that the modem was connected to, i had a spare modem and the switch is fine except port 1 seems to be forever dead. moral of the story don't forget the phone line.