I mean, it is ok, as long as everything is appropriately sized - I live entirely off grid, with several battery banks and inverters, which are essentially giant UPSs - and have regular UPSs for various equipment so that when I shut the power down for whatever reason the network and servers stay up.
I used to use UPSes at home, which protected me from a handful of power outages.
However, those lead acid batteries don't last forever, and when they fail you're worse off than using a dumb regular surge protector. Now you have to replace and responsibly recycle the battery.
For me that e-waste became impossible to justify. A couple of power outages a year is completely acceptable for most home servers.
After many UPSes at home over the years, I currently have only 1 (a business-grade rackmount Cyberpower), and once it needs a new battery pack, I'll probably just switch to a surge protector.
My local electric is pretty stable, I no longer run servers at home that need to be up 24/7, most of my work at home is on a laptop with integrated battery backup, I can use my phone WiFI AP mode for backup Internet, UPSes are a pain to move between apartments, and UPSes have a small risk of dangerous battery leakage.
My own UPS system is focused around keeping the telephone system and one DSL modem up and running through 2 days without power. That way if there is a bad thunderstorm there is no panic about working at home, I can use a laptop and tablets and communicate as much as I need.
I have a PC tower server and realized off the bat that it would not be feasible to supply it with backup power for any worthwhile period of time. If the power goes out it will crash, but it runs on ext4 and ZFS and odds are very good it will come back when the power does and put itself back together.
Not a strawman (I don't think? not sure what you meant by this..), just very curious. You have a setup that is in between useless when grid is down, and fully self-sufficient. Seems possibly very practical to me, but I haven't heard of it before.
Anything like that is better than nothing, for sure. Personally, we already have various critical equipment on UPS.
Having to work out what is protected and for how long gets old pretty quickly, though. So do alarms going off in one room or another if the mains supply cuts out in the middle of the night, when everyone is (was) probably sleeping anyway. Or occasionally annoyances like waking up to find a big job scheduled to run overnight hasn’t actually run because the system that should have run it executed a controlled power-down after an earlier power outage instead.
In contrast, a relatively large but domestic-scale battery system can easily store 10kWh or more of usable energy these days and provide it to anywhere in the building. That’s enough to run most of our house for 24h, as long as we avoid using very high consumption devices for extended periods or running too many of them at once with peak consumption levels higher than the equipment supports — a huge upgrade compared to the small-scale alternatives.
It is, but that comes with other problems that not having overhead stuff simplifies, like not being able to run the tractor around, and having the office then officially grid tied, which means I need inspections and permits and such.
It's totally fine off grid, and I like it that way, plus it offers me a rather robust backup power system.
My UPS is my hybrid inverter. It offers at least 1kWh of usable capacity (after losses), more of the sun is up or the battery is charged above 20%.
Of course there is no native signaling on grid loss, but in practice that's not an issue; for planned maintenance I can force charge the battery and keep the servers running for a day or more, and actual power loss incidents are very brief in my corner of the woods.
I've had at least a hundred times more power outages due to protection devices tripping (usually true positives) than the grid going down, so spending 20 minutes to figure out which socket would be the best choice to hook all the communications stuff up to is a much better investment than buying an UPS. FWIW, I had more downtime with the UPS than through actual grid outages because the UPS didn't like a battery hotswap and powered off, or because the batteries started to gas off hydrogen sulfide, which required disconnecting them immediately, but the UPS then powered down (without a battery) and couldn't start without one, either, so it required rewiring a little bit to get going again.
Edit: My UPS is a line-interactive rack-mount APC unit, which as I understand things don't actually contain a power supply, so everything runs from the battery voltage and is supported by the charger in mains operation, but without a battery inserted the charger doesn't work, because its control circuit is powered by the battery.
How long are your power outages typically? Is it short enough you put the router and NAS on a UPS? Maybe have a backup generator for core services?
I'm not saying this would work for you but for some people, like me, a down and dirty solution might work fine. I live in a village and short power outages (a few seconds to a couple of minutes) are relatively frequent, so a UPS covers many of my needs... for a short period of time, which is most of the time.
For out of the ordinary scenarios, such as the recent Storm Eustice, I just bought a 2.8kW petrol powered backup generator (not a particularly expensive one: equivalent of about US$500). I don't have an automatic failover yet, but that may be the next stage. Still, enough to run fridge/freezer, router, my computer, and possibly my central heating pumps (still need to investigate that).
The problem with UPSs is that they aren't necessarily quiet, and this pisses me off. I don't need loads of fan noise and beeping: I need some batteries in a box that will output a pure sine wave at 230V AC without making a big fuss about it, which is doable, but I'd also like it not to cost an arm and a leg.
Too scary for me. Who decides what is essential and non-essential? Is it worth risking thousands or millions of dollars worth of equipment sitting on the commercial power grid without conditioning? In case of natural disasters you have to accept the reality you could be without commercial power for a long period of time. Might work for Yahoo's architecture but I'd be more comfortable with a more traditional approach myself. If you have a somewhat power efficient data center a small UPS/generator is pretty cheap. I'm guessing they're doing this more for environmental concerns than cost.
Yep, we have battery-backed generators for UPS and a transfer switch at the 480-V feed that comes into the room but it is not enough to power the compute nodes. The UPS allows cluster management nodes and the parallel filesystem (which is a small cluster by itself) to ride through full outages and other PQE.
Hah. The only way it's possible where I live is with a UPS combined with a whole home standby generator.
(I got the generator not just for uptimes haha. Got it because we get a lot of outages and we were losing a lot of spoiled goods from our fridge. About half our neighborhood has generators of some kind.)
The battery integration is quite interesting, although I'd bet they are using it for purposes other than "having to buy one big UPS."
One benefit I see to it is high availability, since the site UPS going out won't take down the servers, since they all have their own. Plus, I'd bet it makes the guys that work on the power buss sleep sounder at night, since its easier to work on without worrying about taking out the whole datacenter.
It's a tangent, but I only recently realized/considered that UPS batteries had come along for the ride with lithium-ion.
I bought one that should power my internet+wifi for about an hour for $45.
I guess even a small one like that would handle power blips for a home server, but in an outage the battery would quickly run out and the setting would matter.
I'm notionally on-grid, but DTE's reliability this summer has been so poor, I've had a lot of time on generator and battery to contemplate such things.
Sooooo, this is is one reason I'm trying to move all the crap I host on my Synology, to a Ras Pi with an SSD, so I can shut down the spinning-rust most of the time. If I don't need to bother with a BackUPS because everything I care about runs off an 18650 for several hours, that means I can keep sleeping when the generator runs out of fuel and just restart it whenever my lazy bones want to roll out of bed.
What Faak said. I’m living on off grid solar and my tech (TV, Xbox, NAS, LED lights etc) never misses a beat, even when a big load turns on. It’s the old tech (i.e. motors) that are actually a bit more fussy.
The UPS is only supposed to get you over the hump while you bring your generators online and let them stabilize. It’s not supposed to last you for days.
It’s not like you have your own Remote Area Power System like you would use in the outback of Australia or Austin, TX where the grid is totally nonexistent or sufficiently unreliable.
Yes, but when you live off-grid most of the systems you use don’t use power (if you can avoid it). You can also build a faraday cage and store replacement electronics in it.
My neighbor does both. I actually also store my emergency solar power source and radios in a faraday cage for this reason. It’s like $100 to build one that can likely survive one of these major events.
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