(no subject)

[theweaselking]

I have never before in my life seen an entire office building switch from main to battery to generator and back to main without a *flicker* on any of the thousands of computers running.

I knew it was possible, but *damn*, it's impressive to see. Now I want specs on the batteries.

My co-workers were not impressed - after all, the entire system stayed up and running with nothing at all interrupting anything, so why is THAT remarkable? Philistines.

Comments

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Goddamn...that means you have conditioned power on every outlet at all times. It also means a problem with your battery bank takes the whole building down, but hey, every system has its drawbacks.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

See, I knew there would be other people as impressed as I was.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

It's impressive. Your coworkers have no clue, but it's not their job either.

The only way that works is if main and generator both supply the battery back, which always supplies the end recepticles.

I want a setup like that for my house. Someone tell Santa to work on it.

[psyco-path.livejournal.com]

Nice. The generator in my building flickers IF it comes on.

[wizwom.livejournal.com]

Sweet, it's a standard APC system, though; I've worked in hospitals, and they usually have that set up.

[corruptedjasper.livejournal.com]

As I understand it, that system is employed by some smaller, workstation sized, UPSes (always generating power from the battery/ies), but as you go up in size to whole-rack size UPSes that gets vanishingly rare. My 3 kVA, 60 kilo UPS (no such kill as overkill) switches over to the battery near-instantly, but presumably keeps the power generation circuits warmed up and ready to go. The problem there is that while the batteries are charging or giving power, the thing makes A GODAWFUL RACKET! HUH? WHAT DID YOU SAY!?

Assuming switchover is quick enough (and it'd almost have to be solid state, because no relay rated for building-size currents will be that quick, I think, but you might go really-big-bank-of-relays), you probably wouldn't notice flickering lights and you certainly shouldn't see computers rebooting, those things have to be able to cope with absence of one full cycle and usually can stand more.

If they do have all power for the whole building always being supplied by the bad ass UPS, then the power wastage ought to be considerable. You might be able to run the hot water system on the waste heat, frex.

[ryusen.livejournal.com]

very nice...

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

I've seen more than one setup where everything always ran off the batteries, as conditioned power universally was the goal. As long as your draw isn't too large a percentage, the batteries are basicly a pass through, and yeah, there's minor heat generation from it. You can go with a system where power is always passed through a conditioner that switches over (which is what I have on a small scale, the important machines and the phone switch in my rack room all live on APC Matrix 5000s, but you will notice when the cutover from wall power to batteries occurs, it isn't instant, and can't be).