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.
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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
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/1q4dUt1yK0g?si=8WOTue9-zGghWlxY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
This was very informative. Thank you!
Data centres, business, hospitals etc. run batteries to bridge the gap until the diesel starts running. It can take a minute or a few until the diesel generator takes over, but it can run for hours and days with refuelling.
Getting batteries for 8h is expensive and risky - what if the power cut suddenly lasts 9h? With batteries you have a fixed storage, with petrol or diesel you can just refuel.
Having that unreliable electricity, my home server would be the least of my problems. I would already have a generator to keep the fridge running so the food doesn’t go bad every other day.
I should probably clarify that the 8 hour ones are infrequent. Once in a month or two. But those are the days that are really annoying. The regular ones are like two hours a day or an hour at 3 different times in a day. All the other appliances are manageable but I have to shutdown my server every time.
Depending on your budget and location, a whole house backup generator can be relatively inexpensive. My family lives in a very rural area in the central US, so we have a backup whole house generator that runs on propane. I chose propane because those motors seem to have less maintenance, plus we have propane for the grill, etc, already on site.
This. Batteries are to bridge the gap until the generator is running.
Are you in South Africa? Personally I migrated to Intel NUCs and run virtualization with them. Power wise I have an Inverter and a solar panel as a backup. Inverter handles all the heavy lifting and switching. This system is purely for my electronics. So laptop, servers etc. There is no “cheap” way to do it, but if you do it in stages it can be affordable. If you can, try not to cheap out on the batteries and Inverter. Lead acid based batteries are OK IF you take care of them. Don’t use the cheapest Inverter. It’s not worth the risk of damage.
I agree. Its never worth the risk.
I think I’ll start with inverter + battery. Then add batteries in the future depending on my power needs.
There are inverters that support battery backup, recharging from solar and grid power that are supposed to go between your grid tie-in and the rest of your house. Quite a ways more expensive, but the battery capacity is probably relatively cheap compared to UPS power and is essentially a backup for your entire house.
The one I read about a while ago was a Growatt that is basically an all in one box. Can provide power from batteries, recharge from solar or grid power, feed back excess solar power to the grid, etc, you name it. And I can imagine other brands producing the same solution.
I’m lucky enough to live in a country with almost no power cuts though. I think we have at most 1 a year for max 10 minutes. So can’t say I have any experience with it myself.
Where are you from my friend? Why do you actually need server running if you have no electricity at home? Your internet is also down right? Dont you need to just find how to shutdown safely when outage happens? Or do you have mobile/sattelite internet as a backup?
I use candles btw 🕯️
Not OP but my fiber optic Internet is not on the same power grid as the rest of my house. I’ve got a battery backup on my routers and modem for exactly this reason. I’ve got a UPS to handle a power outage into automatic graceful shutdown at 33% remaining.
Can you migrate, or setup failovers, to a low powered ARM device? Or one the new Intel N series e.g. N100 low power devices?
If not, you’re going to need to buy/build a fairly large battery bank.
Yeah, been looking into Pi’s and its alternatives. But with the external drives I think I’ll need a big powerbank or I’ve to DIY a ups
What services are you running? Which of them are critical and need to stay up?
Not a lot of critical services but I would absolutely need things like pihole.
Just realized, I can host the critical ones on the ARM device and the services which I can do without for some time can stay on the current server.
Then I’d go that route. Here all is on RPies, alas not the NAS, but those disks are almost always in sleep mode.
Small tip on the storage, go for a cheap SSD external (alie has a few for next to nothing), get at least 2-4, as reliability issues exists, but will show themselves within days or not. Only use rhe sd card to boot from, mount / from the ssd.
1 RPi and an ssd can runa while on a small UPS. (Need to get me one as well)
Not sure if I’m a fan of the “AliExpress SSD” recommendation. They’re badly built and unreliable, you won’t know what capacity you get, and they can be incredibly slow.
Regular, known-brand SSDs have dropped so much in price and are very affordable at low capacities. That should be a much safer investment than buying heaps of most likely unusable drives.
Depends. I used loads of ‘known brand’ micro SD cards and went trough them one per month. I ordered 2 KingSpec and ‘Kunup’ sticks, just to test. (june '20) Of each, 1 worked perfectly, 1 was not good enough for continuous use. The active Kingspec has been active for years now, but I use less then 20 GB of the 120 GB SSD. (Really need to clean up logs, OS shouldn’t use more then 5G, data is on NAS) The ones that were not reliable enough for continuous use are still in use for transport.
It worked here and proved a lot cheaper then replacing the SD card every month. As they are Chineese ‘unknown brand’, ymmv hugely. (and don’t buy something that will just fit, as trade GB isn’t IT GB and Chineese GBs vary even more) It however is always a gamble to buy something from the other side of the world. (but hey, every ‘known brand’ is made in China anyway now, so we already are hugely locked into that country)
With the price of SSDs I’d recommend an internal SSD and SATA or m.2 to USB adapter instead. That way you can choose the enclosure to provide enough cooling, and even open the adapter and add a fan if you really stress the SSD.
You can boot from the SSD directly btw
I know, and from network, but I haven’t put time into enabeling that. (and I have loads of < 1G SD cards that need to be used up anyway)
A new RPI should have USB boot enabled out of the box. I know the first year after release you had to update the firmware to get it working, but iirc that is no longer needed. Just burn the image to the stick instead of the SD card and it’s plug and play.
Look at the Turing Pi.
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.
Most desktop ups are more meant to give you time for the machine to shut down (hopefully automatically) vs actually running them for n extended period of time.
Do you have anything that would still be using the server when the power is out?
It’s not really answering your question, but are solar panels or a backup generator possible in your area? A long power outage like that everyday would be really annoying
It’s odd how people get used to the powercuts. It becomes a part of our lives.
Hadn’t thought of generators. But I feel those might be overkill for me.
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
OP just needs a really long extension cord plugged into a German outlet.
Another German here and yeah I also only had a single power outage (around 1h) in the last 5 or 6 years. Couldn’t even imagine having no power once every day or even every week.
Do you have access to a gas-powered generator? A UPS could keep you up long enough to cut over.
I’m against fossil fuel solutions, a UPS is good if you have daily shorter outages. A quality server-grade UPS is pricey, but can last you much longer.
The best solution, and this is an investment, but would be solar. Tbh if you have power outages that often and you own your place, then I would be seriously looking into solar+wall battery. It would fail over automatically.
We know nothing about your location/usage OP so it’s hard to make recommendations. But if it were me and my equipment in your scenario, I’d go full solar.
UPSes aren’t meant to keep things running for long periods of time.
If you’re trying to keep things on for hours, you need a generator. Then the UPS just needs to keep things running until the generator comes online.
I suspect it’ll be a lot cheaper to get a small generator than it would be to buy enough UPS and batteries to run things for multiple hours.
I have all of my important electronics (computers, entertainment center, network equipment) on CP1500PFCLCD. They’re scattered around the house, so there are multiple CP1500PFCLCD.
…then there’s a 22 kW gas generator that handles everything once it switches on.
I have an apc battery hooked up to it
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers PSU Power Supply Unit PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
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