Brown Outs and Black Outs

magenta321 · #1 08-03-2007, 10:17 PM

I had a really crappy day because of them.

Did anyone else suffer too?

*emeleel* · #2 08-03-2007, 11:40 PM

I do from time to time. It's usually especially bad the first few weeks of warm weather, on Sunday mornings about 8:00. For several weeks, almost every year, we have a complete black out for about one minute every Sunday morning. Best I can figure, during the rest of the week wake-up times are so scattered that people are turning on ACs and appliances at different times, but on Sundays everyone's getting up around the same time, putting too much load on the station.

But we have a lot of other browns and blacks, too. It is SO frustrating. I feel your pain.

**mjfrombuffalo**[$] · #3 08-04-2007, 12:48 AM

I didn't, but I'm not on the big grid of the Northeast - my town has its own electric.

**thinkerlady**[$] · #4 08-04-2007, 12:52 AM

Nah--we are lucky. We are on th grid, but we don't have the outages.

magenta321 · #5 08-04-2007, 07:51 AM

I lost everything I was working on in word (save early, save often, I know...).

The building I am in is the main building and is on generator. The building next door, also ours, is not on generator. All those people are people who cannot do their job without a computer. They all came to our building to use our computers. We had to fight to be able to use ours.

Some of the people in our building got the blue screen of death. They'll get new computers, but, it was too chaotic for our one IT person to give it to them then.

Our phones went down. We could get calls in, but make no calls out. We could not make any intra-office calls.

All in all, it was pretty sucky. It was almost better when we would completely lose power for the day, because then you could stop trying to be busy under a lot of stress.

*emeleel* · #6 08-04-2007, 10:25 AM

You need UPSs. No, not the guys in brown shorts, Uninterrupted Power Supplies.

magenta321 · #7 08-04-2007, 11:07 AM

The doctors and the expensive equipment have it. "We" don't.

*emeleel* · #8 08-04-2007, 11:22 AM

You can get a small one for around $40 - $50 bucks at Office Depot or similar. If it's enough of a problem for you personally (I never remember to save, either!) you might look into getting one for yourself. Just remember it's yours if you ever leave!

Here's one:

APC® Back-UPS ES 350 Battery Backup, BE350R, 350VA/200 Watt at Office Depot.

**drmomentum**[$] · #9 08-04-2007, 11:37 AM

Also, if you use Google Documents instead of Word, your documents will be saved for you automatically, on a remote computer, safe from power outages.

You can save it off as a word document later if there's some special formatting you need to do in Word, or you have to distribute the document in Word format.

Thanks to Google Documents, I haven't fired up Word in many months.
And all my in-process documents are available on any networked computer.

I sympathize with your problem. Before we moved our offices we had frequent electricity problems. I lost work many times because of corruption until we got UPS (uninterruptable power supply). It's not a matter of whether you are worth it; presumably someone dropped significant cash on your machine. A UPS is a relatively cheap form of insurance against both data loss and equipment damage. I use one at home for that reason, and we rarely lose power here.

I've been where you were. Imagine losing power numerous times a day. For many days. The only things that made it bearable were frequent saving, using Google Docs and getting a UPS. Eventually, since we couldn't get the university to move its ass on the electricity problems, I ended up running very long heavy duty extensions to steal electricity from less-used circuits and better balance the electrical load. We had one going from the ground floor to the second floor out one window and in another.

-JP