Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain

On 08/05/2025 00:01, Don Y wrote:

Much like me having carrier doesn't tell me the extent of
my "reach", here.

>
Well, the power outage was "total". :-D

>
Yeah, but you don't know which services (up the chain) may
have their own *local*/private backup systems.  E.g., I doubt
your hospitals were without power (?)  The extent of backup
beyond that would be something you'd have to know, in advance.

>
If the fibre goes direct to the exchange, they had backup power. However, if the distance is great and they have to reconstruct the signal with some kind of optical amplifier, then I don't know. The distance is about 2.5 Km.

 But where can exchange traffic go?  See what I mean?  Anyone that
you want to contact (and everyone along the way) must be "up".

That was the original point of ARPANET then EPSS and later the internet. Packet switching means that any route to the destination at all will do.
I'm told that my fibre feed is passive optical connectors and splices all the way back the regional exchange about 12 miles away. My local exchange was about 5 miles away and a so-called exchange only direct line (which meant that ADSL 2+ was the limit for me prior to FTTP).

 

My mobile phone worked all the day, I could send and receive whatsapp messages.

 Are those processed "locally"?

Mobile phone masts here typically have a lifetime of about 8-40 hours after power failure depending on how heavily they are being used. Backhaul presumably is optical or microwave.
Most powercuts tend to be fairly local round here - a regional powercut or a national one requires something truly catastrophic to happen.
I can only recall one UK powercut in that league in the past half century (August 9 2019). Of course it directly affected the densely populated affluent regions London and the South East. Therefore it was much more newsworthy than if it had affected the remote Scottish Highlands where weather induced powercuts are quite common.
The recent big one at Heathrow didn't affect all that many people although it did take down the whole airport which shows remarkably bad contingency planning - it should have had supply redundancy and the ability to switchover to it before the diesel generators ran out of fuel. Heads should roll over them having to shut down completely.

I have a small computer doing server things, and it tried to email me as soon as the UPS said it was running on battery. That email did not reach me till the power came back; this could be that the fibre went OOS, or that the UPS at my router went down instantly. I do not know.

 Doesn't your UPS deliver log messages (to a syslog server or data
dumps to an FTP service)?
 I have each of mine configured to give me summaries of power consumption
and line conditions each minute.  And, use a syslogd on that same server.

I only log external power failures. Kitchen appliance clocks all reset when we lose power for more than a couple of seconds.

I'm considering replacing the UPS at my router. Some UPS "destroy" the battery too fast.

 Yes.  Rather than spend time investigating it, I've taken the approach
of just rescuing batteries to replace those that have been "cooked".

That is a feature of UPS design that specsmanship to get the longest run time for the sales datasheet means that they cook their batteries. I have seen them swell to the point of bursting inside a UPS. Thick rubber gloves needed to remove the remains. Support metalwork was a real corroded rusty mess but electronics above it remained OK.

 I suspect the problem (rationalized by the manufacturers) is trying to
bring the battery back to full charge ASAP -- as well as keeping the
highest state of charge that the battery can support.

Which taken to extremes is very bad for battery life.

Charging at a slower rate and to a lower float voltage would
compromise the UPS's availability -- but provide less maintenance costs
(of course, the manufacturer wants to sell you batteries, so you
can see where their priorities will lie!)

They really think I'm going to buy their vastly overpriced replacements?
--
Martin Brown