Quote:
Originally Posted by rowan
Peaches, how often do you have blackouts? I'm in a suburban area so I'm probably a bit more lucky, I can only remember a 20 min blackout in the 4 years I've been living here. Plenty of sub-second "blips", but the UPS catches those.
I've also been looking at mini (10') shipping crates, if I've got the gen in the back yard I may as well put the computer room there too!  |
I swear to God I had a lot more outages before I put in the generator
All of our electrical wiring (from my house, the street, all the way down the main road, etc) is above ground. And I live in a VERY heavily wooded area. 99% of the time there's a power outage it's because a tree has fallen on a line somewhere. A couple of times someone's driven into a power pole (one was my dog sitter's daughter - she called to apologize for the 5 hours w/o electricity
)
On the average it goes out at least once a month. Sometimes for just an hour, but it's been out as long as 30 hours before I got the generator and 12 hours after I got it. I got it mostly because I am the only full time house 3 poles from the street, so if there's a major storm (the people I bought my house from were w/o power for 6 days during an ice storm), then I'm going to be the last house they work on. Since I have a limited supply of gas, not a natural gas line, I turn off what I can when the generator is on.
I think mostly I don't pay attention anymore because when they service it, tell me how many hours it ran, I deduct the 15 minute testing, I find my power was out more than I realized. The only issue I have is the 6 seconds. I wish I could make it longer, but the unit I have has it hardwired at 6 seconds. If I could, I'd change it to 30 seconds, even a few minutes as many times the power just flickers on and off.
I would assume that for computer protection you'd still need the UPS since the generator allows the power to go completely out before turning on.