[Robotgroup] An interesting time

[Tami]

Last Sunday, (1 Jun 2008) in the late afternoon we lost grid power in parts of
the neighborhood.  It took AE about 3 hours to get around to fixing it.
Meanwhile I got to evaluate my backup power - which continued seamlessly on
all the emergency circuits.

Styx, the IBM thinkpad Jacob Brown loaned to me over 6 years ago was still
running fine on its (own LiON) battery power when I shut it down about an hour
into the outage!  I'm impressed!

I ran on sunlight for most of the time.  I took a movie of the the
oscilloscope displaying the nice, smooth sine wave of the backup power.

The refrigerator, freezer and ham radios worked continuously without so much
as a hiccup when the grid died and when it came back on-line.  Full power was
restored shortly after 7:30 PM.  My 2.5 year old batteries did well, (we ran
mostly on solar, but the batteries started taking over before the line was
fixed).  They were all still almost fully charged at the end of the event.

It was pleasently quiet outside in the nice south breeze without the buzz of
AC compressors.  Not a bad experience at all.

Getting a battery backed up system was one of the best decisions I ever made.
Had this been a days- or weeks-long event, my (Outback) system has the option
of plugging in a generator to supplement the solar power.  If that happens,
I'll RTFM.  

.Tami
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I'm not a robot, but I played one on TV.