As many of you will know from my post about buying a generator I have a lot of problems with my electricity supplier Enion where I live. In fact I have got so sick of constant power failures I have started to keep a log. These are the entries so far for 2010:
- 5th Jan 2010 – no power from 0800 until 1500 (planned works)
- 17th Mar 2010 – no power from 0817 – 0915 (no notice given)
- 25th Mar 2010 – whole house had a power cut lasting a few seconds. After that 1 phase was out for about 10-15 minutes (no notice given).
- 27th Mar 2010 – no power for 20 seconds at 1008 (no notice given).
- 20th Apr 2010 – no power for 2 minutes at 2225 (no notice given).
- 21st Apr 2010 – no power for 2 minutes at 0835 (no notice given).
- 4th May 2010 – no power for 1 minute at 1102 (no notice given).
- 22nd May 2010 – multiple momentary power outages due to storm. Fusebox tripped at least 3 times.
Before you ask – no I don’t live way out in the countryside. I am 2 miles from the nearest town but I am still surrounded by houses and right next to a major road.
As you can see from the log, most of the time the power cuts are short, but they are annoying because no notice is given [most of the time] and they are random (although I always keep a torch nearby when there’s a storm).
Apart from keeping a generator to deal with longer power outages, I have also taken a number of steps to deal with the shorter ones. Feel free to call me a geek (my wife does). I don’t care. I am not the one bumping around in the dark looking for the matches. Read on!
Emergency Lighting
Very cheap and very effective – I bought this emergency light from screwfix.com for £15. I have it plugged in to the mains and when there is power it charges itself (and it is off of course). As soon as it detects that the power has failed it comes on and lasts a couple of hours – more than long enough for me to check the fuses or get some candles/torches out. In fact it has proved its value so many times I bought a second one (but admit that I haven’t got round to installing it yet…!).
Uninteruptable Power Supply (UPS)
The other bit of kit which is a must-have in my opinion is a UPS – this is important to stop your computer from crashing and potentially causing the hard drive some major damage or from losing data. In the picture is the UPS I have got from dabs.com which I use to keep my main computer, modem, router and wifi access point running when the power goes down. This one cost me £57 from dabs.com. It’s a cheap model which only keeps the computer on for about 15 minutes but that’s enough time for me to shutdown everything cleanly. As you can see it’s got UK sockets on it which saved me from having to change all the plugs on my computer stuff – I just changed the UK plug it came with to a Polish one so I could plug it into the wall.
You can get fancier models that plug into your computer with a USB cable and can automatically shut it down plus models with a much bigger battery to keep you running for longer or to run more equipment off. This is the other UPS I just bought which I use to protect my TV, hifi and satellite receiver.