Power Outage

[wjruth]

Yesterday we had a brief power outage at my house due to passing storms. This caused my rig to shut off for several hours, dropping my PPD down. I was at work when it happened and had to wait until I got home to start it up again.
Is there any tips for minimizing my down time?

 

[EarthDog]

UPS with battery backup... but that is only for a few-several minutes. Perhaps the ability to remote into your PCs and restart the clients would help (this assumes you have your PCs reboot after power loss - a setting in your bios).

 

[wjruth]

I'll look at the bios setting to see what the setting are. I did install Teamviewer so I can access remotely.

 

[don256us]

I set all of my machines to stay off after power outage. Otherwise, sometimes the power goes up and down rapidly and repeatedly and can kill equipment. I just suffer the loss in production.

Further, my farm draws too much power for a UPS to be economical. Hell, I can't even justify using my generator on my farm. Just take the ppd loss and save your gear from extra stress.

 

[wjruth]

Sensable advice, thanks!

 

[wjruth]

another storm passed through last night. After the first power spike I shut the system down. When I restarted, the PC wouldn't recognize the 950 that's on the x1 PCIe riser. Once I went into device manager, it could see the card, but stopped it from running. Stating - Code 43: Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems
I reseated the card, pulled the power, restarted, deleated and restarted drivers. What am I missing?

 

[don256us]

Maybe this?

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725873(v=ws.10).aspx

 

[Jeff G]

UPS with battery backup... but that is only for a few-several minutes.

Depending on how much you want to spend, they make battery backups that can sustain an entire house for hours (probably not practical for a farm though).
If the power is only going out for a few minutes at a time, an UPS might be all it takes to get you through until power is restored. The storms by us the last two weeks have only knocked the power out for 2-3min at a time, but we lost power a total of 4 times in one afternoon. The APC 1500 was enough to keep both my rigs up and running until power came back on. While it's far less drawn than some larger farms, it was also only like a $150 UPS.

 

[JrClocker]

I have all of my electronics on UPS units.

In the folding client I have selected "pause when on battery power".

Without this option checked, I get about 15 minutes on battery power.

With this option checked, the machines stay up for about 1.5 hours...and then "gracefully" shut down at critical power levels.

Protects the equipment, and keeps the OS from getting borked.

 

[wjruth]

Powered off, flipped power switch, help power button to clear residual power and then rebooted. Now it works. IDK, but thanks for the help.

 

[JrClocker]

I've been having lots of "power blips" in this part of Florida the past few days. One of my UPS units (and old one...from 2009) just crapped out last night. When power flickers, it goes into "overload" and shuts down.

Ordered replacement, won't be here until Monday. My "Little Folder" is only running off a surge suppressor now...

 

[wjruth]

After several storms passed and the power flickering multiple times, I am now looking to buy a UPS to at least smooth out these blips.

 

[niven]

When choosing a UPS, make sure the converter fits the specs of your current system; as for the battery, I never had any issues connecting bigger batteries than the original once. Deep cycle batteries for boats and SUVs work great.

 

[wjruth]

So you hacked the UPS with leads running to an external battery or do you mean internal?

 

[niven]

External if it doesn't fit.