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.

  • echo64@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    1 year ago

    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

  • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    81·
    1 year ago

    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

  • bia@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    I actually built my own 2 kWh battery setup after finding available commercial UPS overpriced.

    It took some work and cost me about 2000 euro, but now I run everything (including networking, servers and monitor) directly on a battery feed DC net in my house.

    It’s pretty cool too have all IT equipment unaffected by a power outage.

      • bia@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        It’s not very cleanly built, and parts of it are hidden. But this shows the main parts.

        The black UPS on the left is the old one, not in use anymore.

        The silver inverter on the left feed a rail in my server rack.

        On the right is the battery and charger, and in the middle the fuse box and transfomer.

      • bia@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        It’s very homemade, but I believe it’s built like a DC net for a boat. It’s a bluetooth connected lithium battery, boat cabling and fuse boxes and Victron charger and voltage transformers.

        I built it with “subnets” for different voltages. The battery is 24 V which feeds servers and a 34” monitor, then a transformer to 12 V for network gear, and several 5 V (USB) for a rack of raspberry pis. The is also a small 230 V transformer, for some gear that have built in PSU.

        The largest server is fitted with a custom DC PSU I found on e-bay, others are normal external PSU where I cut the cables.

        • stafeel@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          That’s impressive! In your experience, how does the lithium battery compare to a lead acid one?

          • bia@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            I don’t have a good link to share, but from the research I did the difference is huge.

            LiFePO4 batteries have a higher capacity, longer lifetime, safer and higher power to weight density. Many come with built in communication, like my bluetooth connection.

            They are also expensive, but for my use case it’s much cheaper over time. I use about half a charge per day, which this battery should be able to sustain for 5-10 years. A lead acid battery would probably last months.

      • bia@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Forgot to add that a big part of the setup is in the battery controller, which I built on my own. :) That was a very fun project, and now the battery is fully automatic and charging is based on hourly price and the power provided by my solar panels.