Best strategies to lengthen the life of hardware

[ncalipari]

I need to host some delicate hardware and I would like to take precautions against the poor quality of the power of the wall outlet.

Hardware should run 24/7 and it takes few minutes to shut off (mostly disk writes, so low power). Anyhow the main concern are not blackouts, but brownouts, surges, and general low quality of power.


With a budget of $1000, what should I do?

An online ups? more serious modifications of the electrical wiring of my house?

 

[dma0991]

You could start off by using a voltage regulator. A good quality PSU from Seasonic would help as well in addition to the voltage regulator.

 

[alevasseur14]

Holy jeebus. If the hardware is as important as you say it is, get a really nice UPS and call it a day. Seriously.

For even the above average consumer, what you're asking about is exactly what a quality UPS is for.

Good luck!

 

[TJCS]

invest in a UPS with AVR if you are concerned with brownouts.

 

[ncalipari]

the fact is that I don't know what I should be worried about.

In one post of this forum I was reading about the issue of lightnings and how you should use an 8 feet long earth before each plug, because an UPS is useless in defending you against this issue.



Maybe that was overkill, but I wonder what I should be worried about, and how should I react.

 

[alevasseur14]

You do want to ensure that the outlet you're using is grounded. Beyond that, a quality UPS with AVR will act as surge protection as well as battery backup in order to let everything shut down cleanly in the event of an extended power outage. Finally, the AVR feature will kick in to cover any dips or spikes in voltage.

You should be covered but it might help if you told us exactly what kind of equipment you're planning on running.

 

[LiuKangBakinPie]

A ups and a good surge protector. For extra protection against lightning tie 3 knots in your psu cable or some ferrite beads and looped cords thru them.
just remember some of the more sophisticated UPS units do not tolerate dirty power. Dirty power is power that's off frequency with various spikes and sags in the waveform or higher or lower voltage levels. Dirty power has been the cause of many Ups lock ups. Some manufacturers to look at is APC inc, Best Power or Tripplite. They got good solutions.

 

[tomoyo]

Well since you consider it that serious, I'd say at a minimum a line interactive sine wave ups like the APC smartups. They handle voltage changes, brown outs, and obviously black outs. You could go online, but online is generally really pricey and not very useful for normal home users.

 

[Concillian]

I have some experience at work with some shoddy power. We had a circuit with critical test equipment that we knew was a problem between the breaker box and the outlet, but facilities was more interested in finger pointing and the blame game than fixing the issue. We had to take matters into our own hands and not let these petty issues cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost work. We went to Fry's and bought like $1500 worth of power filter / UPS dealies hoping one would work and we'd return the rest. This was the only thing we got in that trip that both regulated and filtered the power how we needed:
http://www.amazon.com/APC-H15BLK-1-5...3368034&sr=1-1

We used it in conjunction with laser testing equipment and it cleaned up our measured outputs considerably when nothing else would.

It does no battery backup, you can chain a UPS onto this, but it would be my recommendation.

 

[Modelworks]

Start by having a licensed electrician inspect the homes wiring and grounding. Make a list of everything that connects to the home, water, telephone, cable, fios, power lines and make sure all those connections are as they should be. Lightning will use one of those to enter the home. If the home has its ground on the water pipes that is no longer allowed as acceptable grounding points. The reason is pipes loosen, are replaced with pvc and can no longer be guaranteed to be at ground potential like they were 60 years ago when everything was steel or cast iron or copper. If your line is using the piping for ground make sure that piping is still tied to the ground outside the home and not corroded. One downside of using copper for grounding is that it acts as an electrode and it can cause the pipe to corrode and leak. There should only be 1 ground point on the home. Sometimes cable or telephone workers will install a second ground point and that causes ground loops.

Install a whole house surge protector. They cost about $100 and install in the service panel and protect the line as it comes into the home. There should also be a protector on every line connected to the home from the phone company, the cable company, etc. Install these at the point the line connects to the home. All these connections should have a ground wire going back to the homes 1 ground point. For the hardware use a quality online UPS if you can afford it. They are not cheap, averaging $500 to get started but offer the greatest protection.

cliffs:
Inspect homes wiring
Install whole house protector
Install protection on all externally connected lines
Use online UPS.