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How do you keep your home servers online during powercuts? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago* by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 11 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 2 years ago

    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.

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