Onan or Generac? 😉👍
Almost forgot, you need the Magnum remote also to make it work properly
Thanks. I have a home Synology NAS for video and audio via Plex in addition to the router and wifi access point. I have one CyberPower UPS dedicated to the server and a second CyberPower UPS dedicated to the comms equipment. We have regular winter outages here in the north woods due to storms and tree falls. Our outages can run from minutes to hours and sometimes to days.
I initially wanted the power on for comms when we were away in the winter to keep tabs on the house, but I faced the same limited time problem you did with the built-in batteries in the UPS units.
I finally decided that the best solution was a whole-house emergency generator and an Automatic Transfer Switch. About 18 months ago, I had a 26 kW Briggs & Stratton unit installed and hooked to our natural gas supply line.
Of course, as soon as we installed the generator, our area invoked “Yhprum’s Law” (the inverse of Murphy’s Law — “Everything that can work, will work”). Since installing the generator, we’ve had a single one-minute outage.
You should take your method, patent it and take it into production. 🙂
... Only for as long as the iNet is up. Given the license of Chief Showers-with-daughter to have our electricity-generating dams precisely located by an enemy state, you better be on STARLink and plan to be bumped for government use.
Geez - what kind of power system do they got down there where the power goes out that often?
Remember to ventilate the room (potential for hydrogen accumulation).
Do your inverters have an emergency power feature? My inverters let me have 3 electrical panels for 3 purposes: 1) one is the main panel, 2) one is called the "critical load panel" which it'll power if the grid power is down, and 3) one is the "smart load panel" which it'll power when the home batteries are charged to X percent (currently set to 70%).
I have virtually all of my circuits on the "critical load panel" and only a couple of hardly used circuits on my "main panel". The idea being that if the grid is down (which doesn't happen often), my solar and batteries will provide whole house backup. You could do the opposite. You could put the power circuits for your servers on the "critical load panel" so that your solar and batteries would power the servers even when the grid is down.
Unless, of course, you sell power to the grid and your inverters don't have the feature to automatically not put power onto the grid if the grid is down. My inverters aren't like that. My inverters are tied in between the grid and my electrical panels and can power my home panel separately from the grid (I'm not selling power to the grid anyway). Some inverters are tied so the electrical panel is between the inverter and the grid (thus the inverter can't power the panel without also powering the grid, which the power utility can't allow when the grid is down for fear of harming linemen, which means you inverter has to be set to automatically shut off when the grid is down, which means you don't have power to your home when the grid is down even if there's plenty of sunlight).
Remote access?
I probably would use AWS or Azure instances
Both have pretty decent uptime and are really cheap.
Also consider low power computers.
I have one of these https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Q1900-ITX/
It is slow, but it will run hyper-v I have a bunch of vm on it and certainly could run a mail server/media server
With 4 cores running 2.4ghz max tdp is 10w
I’ve used APC battery-backups for years in my home for my computer, router, printer, tv, and other devices. They normally last 10 years. They give you a discount on a new back-up when the old one dies, and send you a postage-paid return label for you to send the old unit back to them so they can properly discard them.
I run a server off grid with solar and 200 ah lifepo batteries to run the small computer, router, and cell phone for internet (all running on 12v dc) The only tricky part was getting a small arduino to kick on a relay for the usb connection between the phone tethered to the router. It there ever is a shut down the router has to boot up before the phone or it won’t tether. The whole set up max draws 8 amps but it rarely draws that much. This is also my 12v setup for everything USB and the lights. I have tried my off the shelf Bluetti power supply but the idle power draw from the inverter uses way too much juice. So I have a couple different systems. The 12v is always on and in 4 years I have never run out of juice with 400watts dedicated solar panels.
If you can move to one of these new mini servers you can run everything off a 12 volt system and skip the power hungry inverters.
Congrats on the good work!
I moved my servers to Azure. Don’t worry about power anymore.
Since my servers needed to be on he Internet for commerce, it became apparent that Microsoft had more resources to counter hackers, cyber attacks, etc than I alone did. I also moved many server-based processing to straight apps in SAAS, so I don’t even worry about updates or downtime.
I understand conservatives not wanting to support this company, but cloud providers are all woke anyway. It’s all for commercial enterprises that must exist in the world. I can’t Galt Gutch them.
bump for later
What’s wrong with having a generator as a back-up?
Very nice. Thank you for sharing. Have you considered taking some servers out of load balancing while energy is short, and also running them at lowest energy use settings during that time as well?
And curious - are you running redundant Internet links? Fiber and 4G for example. Emails can queue if your server is off and DNS doesn’t eat much.
Good post. FYI that the Magnum MS2024 is not grid tie, grid tie usually means that the utility power must be available for the inverter to work. You have an 24vdc Inverter/Charger which allows you to have solar and battery backup.
The APC and the like are there for short outages and to automatically shut your system down in an orderly manner without disk crashes. For long outages you need a separate industrial system that automatically starts when your normal electric shuts off. You also need an appropriate amount of fuel to power it for the amount of time it is expected to run with the power off.