How many power outages are acceptable?

[hinesward]

In an average year, how many power outages do you have at your office? It also seems that these are not electric company power outages. In most cases, the power outage is confined to our building.

We have a power outage about every two months. I imagine most would consider this unacceptable.

We are just about guaranteed to have a power problem on at least one day in April. That's when the AC units really start working hard.

Naturally, I am interested in your own experiences. I imagine most on this board would consider this frequency of power outages to be unacceptable.

 

[kmcferrin]

I suppose that depends upon how well you are situated to cope with them and the scope of the outages. In hotter parts of the US it's not uncommon to get outages. In the midwest we usually get a couple a year, even on a large corporate campus. The important part is that the datacenter has a backup generator and UPS capacity to keep systems running until the generator is running, and of course the building has emergency lighting.

Since the cause of the outages usually is the power company, and they're usually not all that interested in making sweeping changes to the grid to respond to a single customer's request (unless it is a very large customer) then you usually end up have to just prepare for them and accept them when they happen.

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[NESWalt]

Worked in a place in the south... we usually got at least 1 power failure a week in the colder parts of the year. These were caused by everyone turning on their personal heaters nearly at the same time... luckily it only took out the accounting or purchasing group, but a pain nonetheless.

The local utility had VERY old wires (as they said) and we would suffer about 1 outage every few months for no apparent reason -- sometimes because the wind blew too hard. But as kmcferrin said, they often won't do much for a relatively small customer.

 

[ousoonerjoe]

I work at a large power transformer repair and manufacturing company. It is not uncommon for the testing department to completely overload the circuit and knock us off the grid for 10-15 minutes at a time. We may have 3 months of nothing, followed by 3 days of continual interruptions. So to say 6 outages a year is excessive, well, I'd be happy with only 6 per year.

UPS is our friend.

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Stubbornness is a virtue -- if you are right. --Chuck Noll
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[tcsbiz]

None. I've been at my current employer for three years and have had no unexpected outages. We occasionally cause an outage to test the UPS.

 

[SF0751]

We're in San Antonio, so the AC runs for about 9+ months out of the year. We do experience occasional unplanned outages; maybe 1-2 per year. Those are related to the power grid itself, and then our campus generators and UPS units kick in.

I'm not an expert but it sounds like your problem is actually your building's electrical wiring, etc., and has nothing to do with the power company.

Susan
You can have it all. You just can't have it all at once.

 

[hinesward]

We have several UPS in our server room. A few users have requested them on their workstations and have them.

Yesterday, we had one at 4:30. Most people in the office just left for the day.

As one of my colleagues pointed out, because most of the people here do billable work (some at well over $100 per hour), any power outage costs us money.

Ultimately, the main problem with these outages is that they are never planned. They are always disruptive. And you never know when the power will come back on.

Small electric heaters can definitely be a huge problem. One thing I remember telling my users was to plug their heaters directly into the wall, not into power strips.

When I was out at Dell, one company policy was: "Don't daisy chain power strips."

I'm pretty sure it's our building. And this building has other problems as well. It seems like almost any small life form gets into our building, including cockroaches and geckos.

Thank you for all the suggestions. I guess my situation isn't as bad as I had thought.

 

[FredWagner]

From dealing with secretaries and their electric heaters - it will take a management edict to change the situation. One way of sweetening it - there are electric footwarmers in the Office Supply catalog that have a 40 or 60 watt bulb inside, the worker removes shoes, and puts stocking feet on the foot rest, and it keeps them warm, instead of putting 1000-1200 watts of warm air blowing all over and popping breakers.
Another factor - office dress codes that require ladies to wear skirts and heels. Revising the dress code so they can wear slacks and boots, can be another way to approach the problem.

Fred Wagner

 

[FredWagner]

Another possible solution, if the problem is secretaries and electric heaters, who also have individual Laser Printers. Offer the possibility of swapping out the Laser printers for good inkjets - Lexmark makes some dandies that will print double-sided, envelopes, etc, and have ink reservoirs separate from the print heads. The electric footwarmers are the cheapest solution. I've been through this with several times over the years. The space heaters are forbidden in the Safety Policies where I work now.

Fred Wagner

 

[Thargy]

The best name I've ever heard for "daisy chained power strips" was based on the English word adapter, which we tend to use instead.

They were referred to as 'multi-legged crawling adaptapedes'.

I guess your side of the pond things are a bit worse than here. Power cuts happen about once every 3 years, and that's usually when some intellectually challenged navvy puts the bucket of a JCB through a high-voltage cable. The good news is that such navvies tend not to repeat the mistake -ever.

Regards

T

 

[gbaughma]

When I was out at Dell, one company policy was: "Don't daisy chain power strips."

At least in Minnesota, daisy-chaining power strips will get you in big trouble with the electrical inspector.

So will having an extension cord that's not tagged with the installation date, or an extension cord that has been in use for over a certain amount of time.

Good practice, really....



Just my 2¢

"What the captain doesn't realize is that we've secretly replaced his Dilithium Crystals with new Folger's Crystals."

--Greg

http://parallel.tzo.com

 

[hinesward]

Laser printers do use a lot of electricity. But I would never tell anyone to switch out a laser for an inkjet. In fact, if I owned a company, I would bar inkjets from being used anywhere--they are much too expensive.

 

[ousoonerjoe]

Agreed, Hines. The accounting office will have a fit over the monthly ink costs.

We keep several UPS in place. The servers get the big ones (5000 or higher). Every computer is on an UPS. In some places, they have 2 until we can cycle them out for bigger models. We try to make sure that each user can stay up for 15 minutes after the power failure. The Network and Servers are geared for at least 30 minutes to allow the remote locations to finish what they need before we go down. Typically, our outages are about 10 minutes and the remotes never notice, but between the winds, ice, tornadoes, and the random squirrel, we get some pretty good power drops.

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Stubbornness is a virtue -- if you are right. --Chuck Noll
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[Welshbird]

We don't have 'personal' UPS's, but then we all use laptops in a docking station, so we'd just remove from the docking station and use on batteries I guess.

Fee

"The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears, or the sea." Isak Dinesen

 

[FredWagner]

I hope your folks remove the laptops from the dock stations now and then to exercise the batteries - really run them down - if they're left 'on charge' permanently they're not much good when you finally need them.

Fred Wagner

 

[flapeyre]

There are no personal UPS units here, but many of us do have laptops. We might have a power outage once every two years or so.

We do have server UPS units and a backup diesel generator with a 500-gallon (1900 liter) tank. However, most of our mission-critical stuff is in a data center in Dallas (far away from us in hurricane country). Some lessons are learned the hard way.



-- Francis
Et cognoscetis veritatem, et veritas liberabit vos.