The power goes out for a day, sometimes days, every year in my neighborhood when the wind blows. Finally fed up, I recently had a generator installed that attaches to the natural gas line.

I know that purchase was effective, because a week after it was installed there was a big storm and power went out everywhere except my neighborhood. Just having a generator successfully wards off power failure, you never have to actually turn it on.

I submit this is objective proof that I am living in a simulation and none of you exist, you're just artifacts of the simulation.

> Just having a generator successfully wards off power failure, you never have to actually turn it on.

Beware, you need to regularly maintain it too (hopefully it does a weekly starter test, and it probably needs yearly oil changes). I didn't check mine, and found the battery charger had failed at about 1 am when my wife had a flight out that morning. That was fun.

(We don't have everything on the generator, so it's not as effective as yours, our utility wiring is actually pretty fragile, and our well pump is one of the things not on the generator, buying a portable genrator for that seems to have helped, but I did have to roll it out a week ago)

Mine needs to be started once a month and the oil changed every year. I think I can handle that :-)

It would have cost twice as much to run everything with the generator, and that isn't really necessary, so it's a smaller one.

I worried about the battery being dead and no way to hand crank the generator, so I made sure that the generator could be started from a car battery or one of those zap-o-matic car jumpstarters. (I bought one of those last year, and had occasion to try it out on my stone dead car battery last month - it worked great!)

You understand Murphy's law, and other laws of the universe well!

Not only do I control the weather, but the stock market, too. If I buy a stock, it goes down. If I sell it, it goes up.

Every time.

Fortunately, after about 6 weeks or so, the market forgets I did a transaction, and things start moving my way. I'm forced to be a long term investor.

Now, if only you would let the rest of us know before you buy or sell stock ;-)

waiterbright says>" If I buy a stock, it goes down. If I sell it, it goes up."?

Vijay, is that you?

Whenever I'm waiting on someone, say to arrive at my place before we go to some event together, I start doing something else. I'll start doing dishes, playing a game. Within 60 seconds they show up. #GameTheSystem.

> I recently had a generator installed that attaches to the natural gas line.

Hmm. Is this something I can buy at Home Depot or something?

That's great feature. Even powerful gaming laptop, it can run dozens of minutes that's superior than UPS.

Another option is solar panels + big battery.

Sometimes I just want to move the plug from this socket to that socket. Sometimes just to make room for another wallwart.

Not sure what this means. FWIW, I'm in the UK, and short brown-outs are not uncommon if, for example, the national grid is adapting to a failure somewhere during severe weather. For a while when there was a recurring equipment failure a year or two back, my whole area had several full power cuts, even lasting for multiple hours once or twice, until they finally figured out the root cause and fixed it.

The UPSes we have all our key equipment running on have been some of the best tech investments we've ever made, even if they did cumulatively cost over £1,000.

I’m from Denmark and when power went out I was television worthy news. I don’t actually recall it happening more than once. I never experienced a power loss in the five years I lived in France. Now I’m in silicon valley, the tech hub of the world - with 3rd world internet and power that goes out every time the wind blows.

Just reporting facts.

There was a ~45 minute power cut in the centre of Copenhagen last month, starting at about 1:30am. There was another (several hours) in 2018, which I think is the one that made the news. (I was at home, awake, for both.) They're a bit more common than you remember, but I suspect most of these Tweets are affecting fairly small areas, e.g. construction work cutting cables etc: https://twitter.com/radiuselnet

I have some servers in Copenhagen, and from their logs they've lost mains power about every 2-3 years. They have a UPS, but I certainly don't bother for a desktop computer.

I'm from Jutland which might be part of the explanation. Also, I left 20 years ago.

I'm not sure what you mean by "most of these Tweets"; I'm reporting on my experience living in Silicon Valley, California, where power goes out a couple of times a month on avg.

I have all servers etc on UPSes but wish I could find bigger UPSes as most can only hold up about 1 hour which often isn't enough.

tripplite and apc will happily sell you UPSes that will use external battery packs, which is the only way you’re going to get an hour.

until you switch to external batteries, they keep increasing the inverter size, which is unnecessary for your use case.

you could also just buy chargers, batteries and inverters separately and wire them together.

I'll go look again, but last I did I didn't find much [affordable]. I do have an (no longer in production?) APC Smart UPS which can be extended with an external battery, alas vastly overpriced.

Of note, if various online resources are to be believed, you can't just hack and extend the battery capacity for longer run-times as they likely aren't rated for the corresponding higher thermal load.

> alas vastly overpriced.

they're not cheap, but i've bought cheaper and that stuff costs even more in the end.

power electronics that are safe and reliable costs.

> you can't just hack and extend the battery capacity for longer run-times as they likely aren't rated for the corresponding higher thermal load.

thermal load... of batteries?

i'd expect you'd confuse the microcontroller in the UPS. more batteries will require longer to bring up to voltage than it expects, which implies something is wrong. further all of the time remaining estimations it presents will be wrong.

[Following your advise I did find some Tripp-Lite that are almost reasonable]

Thermals referred to the power electronics which do get hot. Yes certainly better to get equipment designed for it rather than risk burning down the house.

California is not like the rest of the US, though. I’ve never lost power except during extreme weather events (hurricanes, intense tree-felling storms, etc).

You’re right about the internet, though. It’s a monopolized system here, and the anticompetitive nature of it means it sucks across the entire country.

I'm in London for the best part of a decade, and haven't ever had a power cut at home, but a few years ago we had a brief brownout in the office (monitors and lights turned off, but servers and desktops carried on running).

I guess YMMV... but it's not something I've personally had to worry about, and won't do anything about it unless the electricity supply gets significantly less reliable. They are saying that the move to renewables might make the grid less stable over the next few years though, so worth thinking about perhaps.

Frankly, I find nowadays I can't do much without an internet connection anyway... Maybe we should put ~5 second batteries into desktops just to sync disks and power off safely.

People who live in low-density rural areas almost anywhere will occasionally have power outages because branches and other things picked up by the wind will hit overhead HV lines and rural areas are often served by a single radial HV feeder.

In a 240V system, that feeder will typically feed one or more pad-mounted distribution substations which feed properties and in very rural areas a number of pole-mounted smaller distribution transformers.

In a 110V system, many more properties are fed from pole-mounted transformers (because you want to minimise length of 110V runs due to resistance losses and you therefore do not want the extensive LV mains used in a 240V system.

In general, the US has longer lengths of vulnerable HV lines but fewer of them are radials (in other words, more US HV runs between two HV/EHV subs and can therefore be sectionalised and run from either end). Therefore an HV fault is more common in the US but it is less likely to take out as many people for as long.

In this case though, it scarcely matters since either system is likely to have properties connected to only a single HV line which comes off as a spur from an EHV/HV substation. These HV lines are often on poles in rural areas and therefore vulnerable to damage in heavy weather. This happens less in urban areas because HV lines tend to be buried there. In The Netherlands which is one extreme, everything under 50kV is buried but NL is a very dense country.

There is no point comparing your experience of power cuts in Amsterdam, London, Copenhagen, vs Chicago or NYC because power cuts are quite rare in all of these places. If you live in the English Lake District in a small village or in a small town in a rural area of the US, you are likely to have experienced power cuts. Performance on continuity of service measures like TIEPI varies much more within countries than between them.

> Not sure what this means. FWIW, I'm in the UK, and short brown-outs are not uncommon if, for example, the national grid is adapting to a failure somewhere during severe weather.

I am from Germany. The latest wide-scale power failure I can think of was 2007. I remember another shorter one in Bremen which must have been around ten years ago. They happen really rarely here, in spite of all that FUD that wind and solar energy makes the power supply unreliable.