My Overkill Home Network - Complete Details 2023
My Overkill Home Network - Complete Details 2023
Hopefully this is not too long! There has been a lot of changes since the last time I posted a full overview like this
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Sweet setup, what's the reason for the extreme attention to backup power? is the grid really that unreliable where you are?
I've had one unplanned power outage in the last 10 years so it seems like a crazy amount of backup to me.
The grid both is and isn't unreliable. I've not had many random outages, but I have had 2 x day long outages on hot Friday's when they were replacing power poles, which the generator of course kept me through. Working from home, and being in the Texas heat, that would be bad. And I like many people now have really bad power outage PTSD after the 2021 Texas Freeze where we all lost power. I'll never let that happen again! And turning everything off is such a hassle, I want it to to all stay on no matter what. Since I work from home, that adds another layer too. Plus, I just like cool things
Yeah that seems kinda crazy to me too. I've lived in my current house for 8 years and the only time the power has gone out was when a vehicle crashed into one of the distribution boxes by the road. Our power and internet come from the same provider so it was a double whammy for several hours.
But I suppose it depends where you are - i worked at a place that had two independent power feeds from two different cities, massive UPSs to run the datacenter for 10 minutes and then two redundant diesel generators with several months of fuel on site. I still saw that go down twice in my time there.
I've had my power go out around 10 times this year. Gotta love that TX power grid
When we lived in Missouri the power went out twice ish a year, sometimes more. Amazing how fragile that stuff is when nobody invests in the infrastructure for the town.
I have no way to prove it, but I'm 99.9% sure that CenterPoint Energy (Who services this grid around here) leave stuff on its last legs so it gets damaged in a hurricane, and they can claim that juicy FEMA money to fix it.
Round here it's all government run. The city runs power, water, sewer, phone, internet, trash/recycle/compost.
We've got the second fastest internet in the country (and it's free for low income people), our power gets an American Public Power Diamond rating for reliability, we're (mostly) on track for being 100% renewable power by 2030, the city captures and liquifies the methane from the sewage treatment process and uses it to run the garbage trucks (that say "Powered by You" on them) and our rates for all of that are cheaper than commercial providers.
Amazingly we still run into people who live here, know all that and still believe that the government is incapable of running anything well... it's kind of startling.
Still, that makes a bit more sense for why you have a generator and that then pretty much requires you have a UPS - so i get it.