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Aaron Cake
Administrator
Canada
6717 Posts |
 Posted - Aug 19 2010 : 09:32:08 AM
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Some may have noticed that this site was unavailable for most of yesterday morning and afternoon, and that there have been some hours of downtime in the past few days.
London Hydro is in the process of replacing all the poles on my street, and has had to interrupt the power. With a little notice, it's not a big deal to shut everything down (the generator was stolen a few years ago). The annoyance came on the 16th and 17th...
The street was connected to a temporary transformer at each end, but they must have used a very high tap because I was seeing 130-133V coming out of the wall. This kept triggering the UPSs to cut in due to an over voltage condition. As these UPSs are a bit vintage, all they can do is go on battery in this case instead of a more modern unit that will just ramp down the output voltage. So they keep cutting onto the battery for 10-20 minutes at a time, eventually draining to the point where they just shut off. Without too much of a choice in the matter, I just had to keep monitoring things and turning them back on if necessary. I think there were 3-4 unintentional shutdowns. Luckily, no database damage.
Yesterday morning I finally had enough so I grabbed my 100 foot 14 AWG extension cord from the garage and coiled it tightly on a spool. I then placed it in series with the UPS in the hopes of at least dropping the voltage a few volts. Well just as I was about to power things back up and check, all power was cut for the scheduled outage between 9AM and 3PM.
At this point, we are off the temporary transformers and while I have not checked the wall voltage, judging by the UPSs, it is a lot happier. We have shiny new hydro poles with all new transformers (twice as many as previously). |
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Recent Power Outages, Aug. 17th and 18th 2010
