Power outages (the bane of IT!)

Earlier this year (in Bergen, NJ) I had the following outages:

May 17th (10 seconds)

Jun 18th (4hrs)

Jun 27th (3hrs; 24 hours of voltage fluctuations afterwards)

Jul 8th (1hr)

After the last the power was so bad my UPS kept kicking in 3 times a minute, causing the battery to drain. In the end I had to take the UPS out of the circuit and trust the equipment to ride the dips (which they did).

I think we lost power twice last year.

On the local town BBS I commented "third world power infrastructure". Oh they didn't like that, not at all!

In England I only had power go out twice in 15 years (once when an idiot kicked a football onto overhead wires, causing them to touch and short momentarily… the system recovered immediately but this caused a reboot of my Atari 2600; once when the local distribution transformer was hit by lightning).

@sweh:

Earlier this year (in Bergen, NJ) I had the following outages:

May 17th (10 seconds)

Jun 18th (4hrs)

Jun 27th (3hrs; 24 hours of voltage fluctuations afterwards)

Jul 8th (1hr)

After the last the power was so bad my UPS kept kicking in 3 times a minute, causing the battery to drain. In the end I had to take the UPS out of the circuit and trust the equipment to ride the dips (which they did).

I think we lost power twice last year.

On the local town BBS I commented "third world power infrastructure". Oh they didn't like that, not at all!

In England I only had power go out twice in 15 years (once when an idiot kicked a football onto overhead wires, causing them to touch and short momentarily… the system recovered immediately but this caused a reboot of my Atari 2600; once when the local distribution transformer was hit by lightning).
My parents in Florida lose power on a pretty regular basis, and the most frustrating part of it is that many times there was often no coorelation with any obvious event (like a hurricane or another storm). Beautiful, sunny day with no wind – bam, power out for several hours. Because of that and because of several extended outages due to hurricane-related damages, they purchased a whole house generator.

Meanwhile, in Boston, I lived in a condo connected to the grid with overhead wires which were surrounded by tree limbs and other obstacles; power rarely went off. And here in North Carolina, with underground wiring, I've only had one outage of more than a few minutes in 14 months, and only two momentary outages.

If the power went out at the slightest wind where I live (North Dakota) we'd have no power at all.

We sometimes get bad ice storms, where the wires get weight down and sag quite a bit, then when the wind blows they hit and cause power issues.

ususally it just blinks, but I can remember once where the entire tow lost power for a good 5 hours.

Some rural places were out for days.

So I'd say we have it pretty good considering the extreme weather.

@sweh:

n the local town BBS I commented "third world power infrastructure".
I got a call from my wife after I got to work that the power outage this morning hosed my monitor. What confuses me the most is that my bill here is 150% what it was in Phoenix. Go figure!

That's a lot of outages for someone else from NJ. Good to hear we're not alone.

I'm also in Bergen County, NJ.. No black outs here, just some minor surges during a major thunderstorm this summer (a tree behind my house was struck by lightning, it was awesome).

Famous last words!

If I lose my 40" LCD to a surge I'm gonna kill someone.

At home (in the city, in a well-wooded older neighborhood with a combination of overhead and underground lines), we very rarely lose power… I wouldn't say "never", but "once per year" is probably high. We will occasionally have UPS chirps during thunderstorms and whatnot, but that's to be expected.

Where I used to work (a small company in the suburbs, in a well-wooded newer commercial area with a number of office parks and mostly overhead lines), power outages were frequent and lengthy. Big UPSes and diesel generators were a must. Longest outage I remember was 3.5 days, 'tho we'd usually get an hour or two every few months.

PROTIP: If you must put the coffee machine and refrigerator on a generator circuit, your power sucks.

I grew up in almost-rural central Iowa. The power did go out frequently, but it almost always had a damned good reason. Even better, they were usually very good about restoring power once the debris/water/bodies were cleared.

Living in a semi-rural part of southwestern Washington in the 90s, we had brief power outages a few times a year, long ones (more than an hour or so) every year or two. We were on a public utility and, thanks to an extensive hydroelectric network, the Pacific Northwest as a whole has unusually cheap power.

Living in what passes for a "city" in southeastern Washington after that, the UPS would kick in at least once a week for an instant, significant outages every few months, but rarely more than an hour or two. Private utility this time, more expensive than the first place, but still cheaper than much of the country (it's gone up around there since then, but it's still only something like $0.08/kwh).

Lived for several months in a "town" 40 minutes outside of Portland, Oregon. Worst electric service in history, and absurdly expensive. Somewhat understandable, though, as it was a cobbled-together system trying to serve a large, barely-populated, highly-mountainous geographic area.

Living in San Jose, California for 9 months, I had two outages; one about an hour long, and another around 15 minutes. Electricity was included in the rent, so I don't know what the per-kwh cost was, but private utility costs are notorious in the Bay Area (average is over $0.20/kwh).

While I was living in San Jose, I worked in Santa Clara (the South Bay is literally "walk across the street and you're in the next city"), and we had a 10-20 minute outage (fun when you've got a bunch of production servers in what amounts to an air-conditioned closet with a big UPS and no generators).

Now living in Santa Clara, CA since early 2007. Two brief outages (a few minutes), and one four-hour one I mostly slept through. Then there was the 6-hour scheduled outage that turned into 12 (rotting power pole). Santa Clara electricity is by a public utility (Silicon Valley Power) that gets a significant chunk (something like 1/3rd) of its power directly from its own gas-fired plant. Residential rates are currently $0.07753/kwh for the first 300kwh, $0.08913/kwh after that.

Everywhere I've lived there have been "blips" (most barely enough to trigger a UPS, some just enough to reboot a non-battery-backed box). Southeast Washington was, by far, the worst, followed by Southwest Washington. Santa Clara and San Jose are roughly equal in this regard.

If anything, reliability and cost have been inversely correlated in my experience, but the underlying factor is really public-vs-private utilities. It's like any other thoroughly-monopolized industry, you're almost always going to be better off with the public monopoly than the private one.

Only time the power seems to go out for any noticeable time is in the winter. We sometimes get big enough storms that the power will be out for a little while. That's about it.

I live a few miles outside of Hartford and I only lose power 3-4 times a year for under 3 minutes. Every 2-3 years one outage lasts longer than 15 minutes. Now I do live in an apartment complex of about 1000 units and underground wiring, but once you get outside of the apartment complex, the wiring is overhead.

I used to live in the town to the north of this one, and we'd lose power for every thunderstorm or heavy rain. The last category 1 hurricane knocked out power for three days.

I would say there are two factors associated with this:

• Living near the city. The cities are well wired and highly populated.

• Living in a large complex. If the power goes out here, you have thousands without power.

Since i live in Milan (Italy), i have never had such problems.

The electrical power is always up.

The last downtime was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003Italyblackout

Montreal has the occasional power failure, but I've got most of my important stuff (TV/cable/360/PC/printer/network/etc) on a UPS.

I've got a Back-UPS RS1500 with the extended run external battery. It can run a 300W load (which is typical when I'm not doing something intensive on the PC) for about an hour.

My network equipment is on the other side of my apartment, though. I can run a power cable over there from the UPS when the power goes out, although this isn't exactly a seamless changeover. I'm considering buying a cheaper UPS to power just the active network equipment (two DSL modems, an Alix 2D3 acting as a router, and a Linksys WRT54GL) for hours.

@Guspaz:

I'm considering buying a cheaper UPS to power just the active network equipment (two DSL modems, an Alix 2D3 acting as a router, and a Linksys WRT54GL) for hours.

I do that with a tiny 500VA I got at a flea market. My primary computer is a laptop, so as long as it doesn't burn the house down, I'm content with it.

@sweh:

Earlier this year (in Bergen, NJ) I had the following outages:

May 17th (10 seconds)

Jun 18th (4hrs)

Jun 27th (3hrs; 24 hours of voltage fluctuations afterwards)

Jul 8th (1hr)

And today from 7:09 to 8:22.

81 days without a power failure! Woo!

And if we all had "Smart Grid", the distribution system would know where the problem was so that crews could respond faster to system damage, and we'd have demand side management for capacity issues, and the world would be a better place.

IPv6 would be ideal for connecting all the nodes of a smart grid. It just needs to become more common in general.

Okay, I admit, I took the opportunity to drop another hint Caker's way here. :-)

Actually, I think I did hear IPv6 and Smart Grid in the same breath at one point…