I'm 38 and I've had power go out in my house for lots of reasons, but all of them came down to me blowing a fuse somehow. I can't remember ever having had an actual, you know, power outage. So I guess I just here to tell you over there in the US that another way is possible. :)
https://www.fema.gov/case-study/overhead-underground-it-pays...
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/21/burying-power-lines-for-wild...
https://research.ufl.edu/should-power-lines-go-underground.h...
https://web.archive.org/web/20220101210439/https://www.eei.o...
(have an electrical journeyman friend who will spend the rest of his life upgrading California electrical infra, we speak frequently on this topic)
Above ground electric lines vs buried ones are a good example of how quickly your ROI can drop off for infrastructure problems.
Spending 10 million to add cold-weather protection to a powerplant that services 5million people? No brainer. Spending 10 million to bury 100 miles of power line that services 1000 people? Ehh...
All power cables except for long-distance transport are underground though, which probably helps a lot and might account for the difference to a large extend.
(Our microwave oven did trip our residual-current circuit breaker a few weeks ago, never encountered that before, only 'fuse switch'-flips. Sadly that was the end of the device after 16 years.)
But I was very surprised to learn that until 2021, most Texans had never had a power interruption in decades (which I suppose added to their panic).
Not all that useful to say "the US" here. California has it's wildfires and earthquakes. The west has extreme temperature swings. Southeast has hurricanes, and northeast has trees, ice, and wind. The entire south likes to run air conditioning. What does your country or its neighbors face? How about 10 countries over?
And now in 2025 you will find the highest density of generac installs in Texas. I'm in a neighborhood where at least 80% of the homes have a standby unit. The substation is less than a mile away but the lines have to go through Narnia to reach us. Outages are half a day at a minimum.
Well my country sometimes has storms that do lead to power cuts for a few hours in the worst case, it's happened to me in 1999 and 2010 (but then there was also flooding that time). It's not happened since except for a couple of scheduled cuts that lasted a minute or so.
About five countries over, there is a special military operation that you might have heard of. About ten countries over there's another one. I'm pretty sure some neighbouring countries also have ice, forests, wind and wildfires.
I've lost hope. In theory it can be done but it feels something on the same order as setting foot on the moon again. We have the technology and capability to do so but somehow our population collective decision results in keep things garabge.
Make UPS data available over SNMP, track via MRTG. A simple, decidedly 1990s solution that unsurprisingly still works. Pretty graphs and everything.
mqtt? How many Docker containers do you have running to track UPS voltage?
I keep forgetting SNMP is not "web scale" and only for greybeards on a minimum of 3+ prescription medications.
Just to re-iterate, Unraid is a proprietary Linux OS based on Slackware Linux. It is generally ill-advised to ever run tooling directly on Unraid when a Dockerized equivalent is available.
I joke if it goes down means something happened to me but sometimes the server has a problem like running out of space since an error logger keeps writing over and over
toomuchtodo•2h ago