My boss and I just finished installing 1300 pounds of extra batteries for our server room’s UPS* units, more than doubling our previous backup coverage.
See, the power company has decided they need to cut power to our block for 8 hours tomorrow night in order to do work on the local grid. And here we were with only enough battery power for 2½-3 hours. (This was more than enough back in the era of rolling blackouts, since those only lasted an hour or so.) We can shut down everything on the inside network, no problem… but a five-hour outage for all the websites, email accounts, dialups, DSL accounts, etc. that we host is not something we want to be stuck with.
So we got more batteries.
We’ll still have to be here at least part of the time tomorrow night, keeping an eye on things, turning off internal systems to conserve power, etc. I can’t say I’m looking forward to that.
* That’s uninterruptable power supply, not united parcel service.
Yuck. At least you were given some advanced notice so that you didn’t have to show up at Edison’s door with torches and pitchforks. Still, 8 hours of downtime for an ISP? =
We’ll still have to be here at least part of the time tomorrow night, keeping an eye on things, turning off internal systems to conserve power, etc. I can’t say I’m looking forward to that.
Send Edison the bill for the batteries, if not your overtime. You never know, you might get a reduced electricity bill…or free Edision hats.
My old building was out of power for three days in 2002 and PG&E reembursed us. Of course, that was after six months of legal fighting and we didn’t have advanced warning.
Edison hats, yeesh.
Overtime.
Alas, I’m salaried.
Me too. Jim as the “efficient” government contractor however, gets overtime.