RAINY SEASON
RAINY SEASON
Sent: 11/19/96; 5:18:07 PM
From: avery@svbus.com (Avery E. Dee)
Dave:
You're a software guy...
I'm a hardware guy...
You must be deluged with messages re your comments about power outages. I lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains for 25 years after I first came to California from Chicago, and believe me PG&E's service was no better then... I lived thru years of winters with outages that ranged from a few seconds to weeks!
But during Corvus days, Mike D'Addio (who I'd coaxed into buying a house in the mountains) and I solved the power outage problem. An auto-starting diesel powered generator providing 220 VAC to the main house inputs. Properly set up with an automatic control system the unit will spring into action within minutes of an outage and provide enough power for your whole house (if sized appropriately). The maintenance on the engine/genset is minimal...like a car...regular oil changes, etc. The cost of operation is surprisingly low... even low enough to tempt some people to leave PG&E off permanently (although in a 100% duty cycle the maintenance will tip the scales against it). To bridge the power gap from outage to autostart, you need a properly sized UPS to hold up your systems until the genset is on line.
My house in San Juan has the UPS wired into the office walls with special outlets and will hold three computer systems complete with big monitors, disks, etc going for about 20 minutes in addition to the fax machine, the PBX system and a few other small devices. San Juan has real stable power so we have no genset. Don't need it.
It sure is nice when the lights go out to be able to keep on working and shut down in an orderly manner. As a matter of fact the fews times it has happened in the last five years I didn't even know the power had failed until I realized the alarm from the UPS was blaring!
Avery
PS There are a lot of other secondary benefits to this type of system as well such as stable voltages for all your equipment...you'd be surprised how low PG&E's mains will drop during the day...I've seen as low as 85 volts AC on our powerline monitor which just wreaks havoc with many types of equipment.
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