Why I still self host my servers (and what I've recently learned)
A short story on why I still go through the effort of self hosting servers and some things it taught me recently.
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Retail UPS batteries don't even last a single year, in my experience. The weekly brownouts and momentary blackouts probably aren't helping.
At this point, I'm just thinking of building my own with a charge controller, inverter and a bank of car batteries.
If you do, make sure you get deep-cycle/marine batteries as a normal car battery will die reeeealllly fast under the typical workload you'll have from a UPS.
They're pretty simple and I considered one before deciding I really didn't want to deal with a whole bunch of batteries sitting on a shelf and just bought a normal UPS.
Do you mind sharing what brand retail UPS weren't lasting a year?
I'm dealing with similar brownouts and also an area with lots of lightning. I got about 5 years out of my UPS batteries. Wondering if I've just been lucky.
Schneider Electric APC Back-UPS 1500VA, 900W.
They power on self-test okay, but go on to just fail to switchover during outages. I'm still trying to figure out if it is a factor of cumulative time, running hours, or they're only good for a fixed number of power failures. And whether its the battery or the UPS device itself.
It feels like crashing your car, and then the airbags go off after you're already mangled and bleeding out.
I have the same model, powering 3 machines with an average load of ~125w when it switches to battery power. I have a NUT host on one of the servers which will broadcast the outage for the other machines and the whole stack shuts down after 30 seconds and switches off the UPS at the very end. Gone through about 4 or 5 true power events now and double that in testing (overzealous I know) but the UPS is 2.5 years old now and is doing just fine. I have a spare battery because I heard ~3 years is normal but so far no indication it’s reaching replacement yet.
I think the important thing for these is to not run them down to 0. They’re only good for one event at a time and shouldn’t constantly be switching over without basically a full day of recharging again (more like 16h to recharge).
I can see consistent brownouts and events being a problem for these little machines. I’m planning on upgrading to a rack solution soon and relegating this one to my desktop in the other room (with a fresh battery of course).
I use an Allpower power station, that has build in UPS.