denverpilot
Tied Down
Lost a phase at the office today and beyond one transformer part of the building was getting 70VAC on regular outlets. Wheeeee.
Interesting to see what ran just fine and didn’t care about 70VAC from the wall. And what said “nope”. Quite mixed but most stuff with switching power supplies managed to just stay running. Probably warmed up their little diodes after their inductors a bit. We shall see what croaks in the coming weeks.
One of the 120VAC legs in the server room went dead, the other was 70VAC but the third was normal. A lot of extension cords and power strips later and things were totally buggered and cobbled to where it all ran again. The UPSes handled the low voltage with style and boosted it. Nice. Guess those were spec’d right. Knew they were but it’s nice to see it actually work. We don’t test the damn things with a Variac after all.
Outage was huge. Took out an entire mall up the road and every other traffic light was apparently on the dead phase.
The really interesting one was half of the gas pumps at a local 7-11 were operable. And I mean half of the pump. Not half of the number of pumps. Ha.
The pump money numbers displays and pump mechanism were alive, the payment screens were down. And nobody thought to mix up the phases for different islands or pumps. Hahaha. Because “you never have a single phase outage”.
Which... is why our little server room has all three legs available and critical things fed off of two of them. One UPS unhappy, the other no problem. Dual power supplies in the devices. Neither unhappy. Until the one UPS dies anyway. Then just a single power supply alarm. Noisy but nothing down.
The voltage drop fried one switch. Poor thing. Spare swapped in by 9PM and by then all power was back. Undid all the dodgy crap to make the phone system happy and went home.
It’d be really nice if they’d buy a damn generator. Oh well.
The one thing that didn’t work was the AC for the building or the server room. Needed three phase. No bueno. But can’t really fix that one. Didn’t get hot enough to bust out the fans or a move and cool. But we’ve got em.
One phase of the 480 dead. Quite entertaining. Just don’t see that one that often. Nor the upstream feed of the other two phases not being cut down automatically with that sort of failure.
Interesting to see what ran just fine and didn’t care about 70VAC from the wall. And what said “nope”. Quite mixed but most stuff with switching power supplies managed to just stay running. Probably warmed up their little diodes after their inductors a bit. We shall see what croaks in the coming weeks.
One of the 120VAC legs in the server room went dead, the other was 70VAC but the third was normal. A lot of extension cords and power strips later and things were totally buggered and cobbled to where it all ran again. The UPSes handled the low voltage with style and boosted it. Nice. Guess those were spec’d right. Knew they were but it’s nice to see it actually work. We don’t test the damn things with a Variac after all.
Outage was huge. Took out an entire mall up the road and every other traffic light was apparently on the dead phase.
The really interesting one was half of the gas pumps at a local 7-11 were operable. And I mean half of the pump. Not half of the number of pumps. Ha.
The pump money numbers displays and pump mechanism were alive, the payment screens were down. And nobody thought to mix up the phases for different islands or pumps. Hahaha. Because “you never have a single phase outage”.
Which... is why our little server room has all three legs available and critical things fed off of two of them. One UPS unhappy, the other no problem. Dual power supplies in the devices. Neither unhappy. Until the one UPS dies anyway. Then just a single power supply alarm. Noisy but nothing down.
The voltage drop fried one switch. Poor thing. Spare swapped in by 9PM and by then all power was back. Undid all the dodgy crap to make the phone system happy and went home.
It’d be really nice if they’d buy a damn generator. Oh well.
The one thing that didn’t work was the AC for the building or the server room. Needed three phase. No bueno. But can’t really fix that one. Didn’t get hot enough to bust out the fans or a move and cool. But we’ve got em.
One phase of the 480 dead. Quite entertaining. Just don’t see that one that often. Nor the upstream feed of the other two phases not being cut down automatically with that sort of failure.
