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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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[–] 15 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    It’s not very cleanly built, and parts of it are hidden. But this shows the main parts.

    The black UPS on the left is the old one, not in use anymore.

    The silver inverter on the left feed a rail in my server rack.

    On the right is the battery and charger, and in the middle the fuse box and transfomer.

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    More info on how you built your setup please

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It’s very homemade, but I believe it’s built like a DC net for a boat. It’s a bluetooth connected lithium battery, boat cabling and fuse boxes and Victron charger and voltage transformers.

    I built it with “subnets” for different voltages. The battery is 24 V which feeds servers and a 34” monitor, then a transformer to 12 V for network gear, and several 5 V (USB) for a rack of raspberry pis. The is also a small 230 V transformer, for some gear that have built in PSU.

    The largest server is fitted with a custom DC PSU I found on e-bay, others are normal external PSU where I cut the cables.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    That's impressive! In your experience, how does the lithium battery compare to a lead acid one?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    I don’t have a good link to share, but from the research I did the difference is huge.

    LiFePO4 batteries have a higher capacity, longer lifetime, safer and higher power to weight density. Many come with built in communication, like my bluetooth connection.

    They are also expensive, but for my use case it’s much cheaper over time. I use about half a charge per day, which this battery should be able to sustain for 5-10 years. A lead acid battery would probably last months.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Forgot to add that a big part of the setup is in the battery controller, which I built on my own. :) That was a very fun project, and now the battery is fully automatic and charging is based on hourly price and the power provided by my solar panels.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    DIY, all DC is often the way to go if you are trying to run for a long period of time. UPSs are really typically designed to run just long enough ride out brown-outs or to shut everything down safely in a total blackout. Some even shut down if they don't sense a heavy enough load (i.e., designed to assume servers have shut down, and so preserves the battery -I banged my head against that for so long!).

    I have everything on a consumer-grade APC now, and I have it set up to give me about 3 minutes of server, + another half hour of basic networking. I do have some marine deep cycles and an inverter, so I could set up the networking to run longer if cell towers were down and I needed it. But I'd likely use the energy for other things.

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