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