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.
You must log in or register to comment.
I live in a part of the world where powercuts are pretty frequent.
Texas?
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.
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.
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.
OP just needs a really long extension cord plugged into a German outlet.
Another German here and yeah I also only had a single power outage (around 1h) in the last 5 or 6 years. Couldn’t even imagine having no power once every day or even every week.
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…).
I rarely get power outages so I just use a filesystem that can take the abuse (ei btrfs or zfs)
Any journaled filesystem is mostly fine (e.g. good old ext4).
Same as you, if power goes down for a long time I have bigger problems than not being able to access my home server. Guess I could still hook it up to my car battery and DC->AC converter if I really wanted to, and use my phone as 4G modem/backup internet access.
Ext4 can get corrupted in some cases. Its very rare but there is no way of knowing since ext4 doesn’t have file checksums.
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 🕯️
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, been looking into Pi’s and its alternatives. But with the external drives I think I’ll need a big powerbank or I’ve to DIY a ups
What services are you running? Which of them are critical and need to stay up?
Not a lot of critical services but I would absolutely need things like pihole.
Just realized, I can host the critical ones on the ARM device and the services which I can do without for some time can stay on the current server.
deleted by creator
The price wtf :O
deleted by creator
I love that it advertises user serviceable
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.
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.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers PSU Power Supply Unit PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
[Thread #132 for this sub, first seen 11th Sep 2023, 19:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
some 2nd hand car batteries + 12-230v converter are probably the cheapest option
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.
“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.
Thanks for your insight. You seem to have some experience.
I’m currently researching a solar hybrid power system in India and am going through different battery types. We have used deep-cycle lead-acid batteries with a regular UPS and I’m familiar with their lifesoan.
Do lifepo4s last longer? I’m only seeing marginally longer lifespans. I’m also concerned about safety. I’m quite scared of regular lithiums and have read that lifepo4s are more hardy.
What about maintenance? Anything else I need to know about them?
Car batteries are cheap storage if you very rarely discharge them. You get many years if you are only using the top 80% or so of their voltage range, but if you discharge them to 50%, you only get a few hundred cycles, and if you discharge to 0%, you get dozens, if that. “Deep cycle” batteries have the same characteristic, but tend to give you more amp-ours before you hit those thresholds.
Good Lifepo4 batteries could last up to 10 years with daily full discharges. They are quite amazing in that respect. They are also likely safer than even lead acid -which need to be vented properly to avoid hydrogen gas buildup. They don’t get thermal runaway like lipos, but the cells are very much capable of producing enough current for electrical fires, so you want ones that are built properly. Maintenance is pretty much just “don’t ever charge it if it’s frozen.”
I didn’t know that deep-discharge batteries also had the same characteristics, TIL, and it makes sense based on my experience with them!
As the other commenter said, it’s all about depth of discharge. A 10kWh Lifepo4 bank gets you almost 10kWh every time while you should treat a 10kWh lead-acid bank as if it was a 2kWh bank for any sort of decent life, with deep discharges being limited to emergency situations.
All lithium chemistries are practically maintenance free while you are probably familiar with water level monitoring and equalization of lead acid.
Note that all site built lithium banks MUST have a balance mechanism as this is their “automated maintenance”. Without balancing on every charge, lithium cells will be rapidly destroyed.
Good points to note, thank you! I would have taken the balancing circuit for granted, but it doesn’t hurt to double-check with vendors.
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.
I have an apc battery hooked up to it
UPSes aren’t meant to keep things running for long periods of time.
If you’re trying to keep things on for hours, you need a generator. Then the UPS just needs to keep things running until the generator comes online.
I suspect it’ll be a lot cheaper to get a small generator than it would be to buy enough UPS and batteries to run things for multiple hours.
