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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by stafeel@lemmy.ml to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

I live in a part of the world where powercuts are pretty frequent. 1 per day is normal. They last between 1 and 8 hours. A day without powercuts feels like a special occasion.

My machine is powered by a desktop ups which is terrible. It is only supposed to power everything for a few minutes to shutdown safely. But it is cheap and I don't know much about other affordable alternatives.

How do you folks who self host at home deal with powercuts? Any recommendations? 8 hours of uptime from a ups sounds almost impossible or totally unaffordable to me.

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[-] Delusional@lemmy.world 41 points 1 year ago
[-] Molecular0079@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

I am totally out of the loop. Why is Texas's power grid that bad right now?

[-] ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world 26 points 1 year ago
[-] jhulten@infosec.pub 5 points 1 year ago

Not just the GOP, but privatization of public goods and services. Profit motive is a terrible way to run a power grid.

Just the GOP. All done by Republicans.GOP sold off public property for a quick buck.

Texans got exactly who they voted for.

[-] Craftkorb@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago

I'm honestly dumbfounded how that can happen in the US. Here in Germany power outages are rare, maybe a few minutes in 8 years.

I really don't get how something so important is left so broken in the biggest economy on earth.

I'm not trying to be mean.

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[-] echo64@lemmy.world 28 points 1 year ago

Multiply your server wattage by 8 hours. That's how much battery you need. It's probably not going to be a cheap investment.

The alternative would be to keep your ups and invest in a generator you can kick on if there is a power cut, but if it's every day, that might get rough. Technology connections figured out a build it yourself solution a few years ago https://youtu.be/1q4dUt1yK0g?si=8WOTue9-zGghWlxY

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[-] CmdrShepard@lemmy.one 3 points 1 year ago

I'd multiply by 10-12 hours to account for losses in the DC-AC conversion.

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[-] rambos@lemm.ee 21 points 1 year ago

Where are you from my friend? Why do you actually need server running if you have no electricity at home? Your internet is also down right? Dont you need to just find how to shutdown safely when outage happens? Or do you have mobile/sattelite internet as a backup?

I use candles btw 🕯️

[-] shnizmuffin@lemmy.inbutts.lol 7 points 1 year ago

Not OP but my fiber optic Internet is not on the same power grid as the rest of my house. I've got a battery backup on my routers and modem for exactly this reason. I've got a UPS to handle a power outage into automatic graceful shutdown at 33% remaining.

[-] lustrum@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

Same deal here.

Can keep my WiFi up and running for hours in a power outage, even when cell signal has dropped out. Server on a separate UPS shuts down at about 40%.

[-] rambos@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

That makes sense now, thx

[-] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Germany.

I don't. Can't remember a power outage ever except for shorting our connection box :)

Besides that only some internet outages of our ISP but that is also very rare today.

Edit: At work we sell 750VAh to our customers which are usually very small in demand and workload

[-] CmdrShepard@lemmy.one 34 points 1 year ago

OP just needs a really long extension cord plugged into a German outlet.

[-] neeeeDanke@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago

for real, my homeserver in my appartment had an uptime of 450ish days before I had to power it down, because I wanted to plug in a power meter in front of it (don't have anything fancy with redundant psus or something like that...).

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[-] Treczoks@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

I live in a part of the world where powercuts are pretty frequent.

Texas?

[-] dandroid@dandroid.app 15 points 1 year ago

I have solar panels and a backup battery for the whole house. I live in a rural area that is currently under heavy construction, as they are trying to make this area into a small city, so power outages are unfortunately extremely common.

[-] bia@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

I actually built my own 2 kWh battery setup after finding available commercial UPS overpriced.

It took some work and cost me about 2000 euro, but now I run everything (including networking, servers and monitor) directly on a battery feed DC net in my house.

It's pretty cool too have all IT equipment unaffected by a power outage.

[-] cybersandwich@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago
[-] bia@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

It’s not very cleanly built, and parts of it are hidden. But this shows the main parts.

The black UPS on the left is the old one, not in use anymore.

The silver inverter on the left feed a rail in my server rack.

On the right is the battery and charger, and in the middle the fuse box and transfomer.

[-] stafeel@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago

More info on how you built your setup please

[-] bia@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

It’s very homemade, but I believe it’s built like a DC net for a boat. It’s a bluetooth connected lithium battery, boat cabling and fuse boxes and Victron charger and voltage transformers.

I built it with “subnets” for different voltages. The battery is 24 V which feeds servers and a 34” monitor, then a transformer to 12 V for network gear, and several 5 V (USB) for a rack of raspberry pis. The is also a small 230 V transformer, for some gear that have built in PSU.

The largest server is fitted with a custom DC PSU I found on e-bay, others are normal external PSU where I cut the cables.

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[-] circuscritic@lemmy.ca 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Can you migrate, or setup failovers, to a low powered ARM device? Or one the new Intel N series e.g. N100 low power devices?

If not, you're going to need to buy/build a fairly large battery bank.

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[-] Curious_Canid@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I have a small UPS to keep my fiber and router working for a while and I have a larger UPS for my server. Even the larger UPS will only keep the server going for maybe half-an-hour, but most outages here are short. For me, the most important benefit is that my UPS will tell my server to shutdown when it begins to get short of power. Graceful shutdowns remove the risk of corruption and data loss.

[-] Chup@feddit.de 11 points 1 year ago

Data centres, business, hospitals etc. run batteries to bridge the gap until the diesel starts running. It can take a minute or a few until the diesel generator takes over, but it can run for hours and days with refuelling.

Getting batteries for 8h is expensive and risky - what if the power cut suddenly lasts 9h? With batteries you have a fixed storage, with petrol or diesel you can just refuel.

Having that unreliable electricity, my home server would be the least of my problems. I would already have a generator to keep the fridge running so the food doesn't go bad every other day.

[-] colebrodine@midwest.social 6 points 1 year ago

Depending on your budget and location, a whole house backup generator can be relatively inexpensive. My family lives in a very rural area in the central US, so we have a backup whole house generator that runs on propane. I chose propane because those motors seem to have less maintenance, plus we have propane for the grill, etc, already on site.

[-] stafeel@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

I should probably clarify that the 8 hour ones are infrequent. Once in a month or two. But those are the days that are really annoying. The regular ones are like two hours a day or an hour at 3 different times in a day. All the other appliances are manageable but I have to shutdown my server every time.

[-] SheeEttin@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

This. Batteries are to bridge the gap until the generator is running.

[-] hexdream@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 year ago

Are you in South Africa? Personally I migrated to Intel NUCs and run virtualization with them. Power wise I have an Inverter and a solar panel as a backup. Inverter handles all the heavy lifting and switching. This system is purely for my electronics. So laptop, servers etc. There is no "cheap" way to do it, but if you do it in stages it can be affordable. If you can, try not to cheap out on the batteries and Inverter. Lead acid based batteries are OK IF you take care of them. Don't use the cheapest Inverter. It's not worth the risk of damage.

[-] stafeel@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

I agree. Its never worth the risk.

I think I'll start with inverter + battery. Then add batteries in the future depending on my power needs.

[-] Sleepkever@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

There are inverters that support battery backup, recharging from solar and grid power that are supposed to go between your grid tie-in and the rest of your house. Quite a ways more expensive, but the battery capacity is probably relatively cheap compared to UPS power and is essentially a backup for your entire house.

The one I read about a while ago was a Growatt that is basically an all in one box. Can provide power from batteries, recharge from solar or grid power, feed back excess solar power to the grid, etc, you name it. And I can imagine other brands producing the same solution.

I'm lucky enough to live in a country with almost no power cuts though. I think we have at most 1 a year for max 10 minutes. So can't say I have any experience with it myself.

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[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 year ago

I rarely get power outages so I just use a filesystem that can take the abuse (ei btrfs or zfs)

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[-] Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz 6 points 1 year ago

some 2nd hand car batteries + 12-230v converter are probably the cheapest option

[-] mudeth@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 year ago

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but auto batteries aren't meant for deep discharge. UPS's use a specific type of battery that is meant for it.

Using auto batteries in this situation would likely end up in them dying after a few months.

[-] evranch@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago

"Deep cycle" batteries are the best of the lead-acids for the task. But they are still obsolete and you should source lithium if at all practical.

However if power interruptions are short, loads are low or you have an external power source like solar or wind, inferior batteries can do the job.

I use a bunch of old car batteries at my house for my battery bank. It's more of a big capacitor, but it's almost always sunny here and kW of solar are pouring in.

My critical equipment i.e. starlink, home and farm automation and monitoring, cell booster and HMI/SCADA only take a couple hundred watts, so no big deal. Most of the solar power goes to keeping the freezers cold.

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[-] Faceman2K23@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago

I have 2 UPS's, a small one that runs the fibre gear and keeps the connection alive and the main one in the rack that keeps the main server running for a couple of hours.

I've only ever had 1 power outage in the last 5 years though and it was scheduled electrical work. couple of brownouts during storms that were just barely deep enough to kick in the UPS boost for a minute but nothing major. nothing else is critical enough to worry about it in my case.

but if I were in a place where power is patchy, I'd have enough solar+battery for the whole house to last a normal day/night cycle, then a UPS for the rack, then a generator as a last resort only.

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[-] johntash@eviltoast.org 3 points 1 year ago

Most desktop ups are more meant to give you time for the machine to shut down (hopefully automatically) vs actually running them for n extended period of time.

Do you have anything that would still be using the server when the power is out?

It's not really answering your question, but are solar panels or a backup generator possible in your area? A long power outage like that everyday would be really annoying

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[-] TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub 3 points 1 year ago

Do you have access to a gas-powered generator? A UPS could keep you up long enough to cut over.

I'm against fossil fuel solutions, a UPS is good if you have daily shorter outages. A quality server-grade UPS is pricey, but can last you much longer.

The best solution, and this is an investment, but would be solar. Tbh if you have power outages that often and you own your place, then I would be seriously looking into solar+wall battery. It would fail over automatically.

We know nothing about your location/usage OP so it's hard to make recommendations. But if it were me and my equipment in your scenario, I'd go full solar.

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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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