UPS story (Was Re: Cheap or free auto-shutdown setup)

[Otto J. Makela]

In article <80 at comix.UUCP> jeffl at comix.UUCP (Jeff Liebermann) writes:
[Horror story what happened to computers during earthquake...]
   1.  The power died about 20 seconds after the quake started.  During
   these 15 seconds, the power was there but oscillating wildly.  Most
   UPS's did NOT activate during this time.  The high frequency trash
   went straight thru the UPS, filters, surge protectors, switching
   power supplies, and ended up causing 2 hard disk controller cards to
   lose step and eat the data on the hard disk.
[...]

Last summer, I was working at my desk during a heavy rainstorm.  Suddenly I
hear this beep-beep-beep, which turned out to be coming from our UPS on our
main 386Unix machine.  The power seemed to be good, all the other machines
worked normally, but the UPS had switched to internal power.

Mysterious, I thought.  As I was walking back to my desk, I noticed this big
truck with thick cables coming out was parked in front of our office.  The
cables went down to our cellar, and there were lots of these guys in Electric
Company overalls running around, looking rather frantic.  Turns out that the
heavy rainfall had flooded a 20kV line below the street, and they were trying
to stop the flooding to get to the lines.  This was made difficult by all the
special effects the drenched connectors were giving out :-)

Turns out that the truck was a generator, and they were keeping the local grid
up with it!  Only the UPS seemed to notice that it wasn't the "normal" type
of electricity that it was getting from the grid.  I told everyone to shut down
(because the electricity people told me they COULD lose power any minute), but
after about a half hour they got the flooding under control and were able to
restore normal power to the grid.

In this case, the UPS was a bit over-sensitive.  Then again, the requirements
for electrical systems in Finland are VERY strict in comparison with the USA.
Also, Finland is not exactly an active earthquake area.
--
   /* * * Otto J. Makela <otto at jyu.fi> * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * */
  /* Phone: +358 41 613 847, BBS: +358 41 211 562 (CCITT, Bell 24/12/300) */
 /* Mail: Kauppakatu 1 B 18, SF-40100 Jyvaskyla, Finland, EUROPE         */
/* * * Computers Rule 01001111 01001011 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * */