Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain

On 2025-05-08 13:49, Don Y wrote:
...

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.

 I don't think I've ever (regardless of where I've lived) experienced
a deliberate power cut.  A drunk may take out a telephone pole or
a branch may fall on some high tension wires but no one has ever
said "sorry, we're turning the lights out" (for whatever reason)

Not the same, but past Monday someone stole the signalling cable in the high speed railway to Andalussia, leaving the entire line OOS. I heard that trains were authorized to run at 40 Km/h, so that they could see the other train in time and tail it. Not sure it worked.
The authorities talked of sabotage. The price of the cable when new is not even a thousand euros, but the damage to thousands of people is huge.
...

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.

 Yup.  They have a rationalization, though -- they are trying to provide the
highest availability.  Else, how much availability do you sacrifice to
maximize battery life?  Do you then start specifying battery life as a
primary selection criteria?
 [Most SOHO users buy a UPS -- thinking they are being "professional" -- and
then discard it when the battery needs replacing and they discover the
costs charged by the UPS manufacturer -- or local "battery stores"]

25€. A 9Ah item, high discharge rate.

 

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.

 Of course.  But, they are in the PRIMARY business of selling batteries,
not UPSs!

Ugh.
And having disgruntled customers.

 

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?

 If you were a business, it would just be a maintenance expense.
You would budget for it.  If SOHO, you'd likely replace it at
most once and then realize "Gee, I haven't NEEDED this in the
past three years so why am I spending more money on it?"
 With the exception of multi-user servers, individual workstations
usually have auto-backup provisions *in* the key applications.
And, in the event of an outage (even if the machine stays up),
the user is usually distracted by the rest of the house/office
going black; is ~15 minutes of uptime going to be enough if the
user isn't AT the machine when power fails?

You need software monitoring to hibernate or power off the machine.

 No one has yet to address the market where TCO is the driving
criteria.
 

--
Cheers, Carlos.