Thursday, April 21, 2022

Power! I Want Power!

Today my external monitor went black and then lots of stuff stopped working.   When I lived up on the hill, Idaho Power service was so unreliable that I felt like a prophet having put in a backup generator.   But still better than the Third World nation north of San Francisco where we frequently had no power.  One weekend for 16 hours.  As a friend put it, "I want to move somewhere with infrastructure."

Yesterday is I think only the second time in two years with an unscheduled outage.  My laptop continued running of course but the wireless router was off so no visits to the Library of Congress website. 

Today I received a shipment of two 350W UPSs.  One for the laptop, two external monitors, and the sea of USB devices operating off a USB hub: headphones, backup hard drives, wireless mouse, keyboard, and I cannot immediately remember what else.  From asking Philips and Samsung support I concluded that the two monitors gobble about 70 watts and the laptop has a 65W power brick. This should hold me through at least short outages.

The other one now feeds the router.  I have no idea of its wattage but I suspect 350W should last a long time. 

4 comments:

  1. Watch out for laser-printers. The UPS devices in my care that have been killed have all emitted smoke after someone plugged a laser-printer into them, not realizing the current drawn by the printer's heating mechanism.

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  2. I have 10kw of solar panels on my roof, and a LG battery that they feed into.

    The battery is set up so that over night it 1/2 drains into the house. On most nights I don't pull from the grid until around 2 AM--leaving me 1/2 the battery in case the power fails before the panels start working again. Lately with warmer weather it's gone a few nights not pulling from the grid at all.

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  3. Oh, and the UPSs don't help if your internet provider doesn't have their stuff on a UPS. Centurylink Suxors.

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    Replies
    1. I have seen no evidence that my ISP is at CenturyLink competence.

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