Five Things Make a Post

[rolanni]

1. The new coffee pot has landed!

2. About a half-hour ago we had a Mystery Power Outage. My screen went dark and my computer went offline as I was typing. I wonder if this means the UPS no longer works. I wonder how I tell.

2A. The power just went down again, taking the screen and the box offline. The UPS also went offline. That's not right. Gah. I don't mean to whine, but I really hadn't budgeted for a new UPS this week.

3. When everything came back on, Open Office helpfully recovered (most of) my chapter. Go, Open Office.

4. It was 45 degrees(F) at my house today. That's not right.

5. Progress on Mouse and Dragon

10,801 / 100,000 (10.8%)

5A. The above is actually not an accurate count. I have most of two chapters outlined. I only, she said with a straight face, need to type them.

Comments

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

You could always tease us by posting bits and pieces from the outline :-)

Checking the UPS? Some of them used to have a test circuit? Also, in at least one case, there was a helpful little "battery status" lamp -- which when we finally noticed that it was neither the recommended green nor the warning red, but simply black, did suggest that we had a problem with our UPS. I hate to suggest it, but check the manual? Note: many manufacturers now put manuals online, having discovered that some of us don't keep track of that paper supplement when installing equipment.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

If it's an APC UPS, you can usually get a price break of an upgrade if you trade it in.

[xengar.livejournal.com]

You can even get a price break on a new APC by trading in a non-APC. APC Trade-UPS program (http://buy.apc.com/commerce/storefronts/tradeups/tradein.aspx?storefrontcode=apcetu&countrycode=us&tradeups_id=).

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Also, APC-brand UPS units have user-replaceable batteries. I have replaced batteries in TrippLite units, but I'm an FCC-licensed Electronic Genius. Who knows where not to put his fingers in no-user-serviceable-parts equipment . . .

[ariaflame.livejournal.com]

Hopefully the power outages don't have anything to do with New Coffee Pot.

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

oh . . . electron jealousy? The theft of the watts? Drawn power cords at High Noon? The little coffee pot that could?

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

The power outages more likely had something to do with the weight of branches and trees (with some potential icing given the temperature and the breeze) on powerlines; there's also the chance that a traffic accident may have taken a pole down -- it has happened before, especially in this kind of cusp weather. All told we lost power for an hour and thirty minutes .. .but there were at least three distinct outages and a lot of on-off on-off surging as part of it. We went to sleep in the dark, so to speak...

Another, unrealized problem may be that when we replaced Sharon's old computer with something built this century we did not upgrade that UPS ... which may well be underpowered for the replacement machine's 500 watt power supply, even if the LCD screen draws less than her old monitor.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Surges can do odd things to UPSs. They should theoretically cope, but I've found a couple (one APC, the other not) which did not handle repeated brief outages (around a quarter of a second repeated several times in a ten second period) at all well, they didn't pass the surges on but instead 'crowbar'd themselves and went offline completely until they thought it was safe again (about a minute).

Note that (a) a 500W power supply rarely actually draws 500W except possibly at startup (none of my computers, not even the big fileserver, actually draw more than 250W even with power supplies rated at 500W or more), and (b) the rating on UPS is usually 'VA' not 'Watts' (this probably makes little difference with a modern switched-mode computer power supply, but older transformer ones could take quite a bit more current than their power in Watts would imply because they were an inductive load, meaning that you needed a bigger UPS for the same nominal power rating of the PSU).

Created in honor of your post

[edgreenberg.livejournal.com]

http://mine.icanhascheezburger.com/view.aspx?ciid=3396341

[sambear.livejournal.com]

Re: 2.

How to test UPS:

1.) Unplug UPS from Wall Receptacle.

2.) Discern if PC is still running / operating.

3.) Test complete

:)

Glad to hear you haz coffee again!

UPS

[fridayflute.livejournal.com]

Check your UPS warrantee, or at least call the manufacturer. When my two Belkin ones died, they very nicely shipped me two new ones for virtually nothing. They put the cost of the two new ones on a card, and then when the old ones came back to them voided out the transaction. All I ended up paying was the cost of shipping them the old ones.