Hal Murray wrote: > My power went out the other day. That reminded me that I've always been > slightly curious about that area.
Our telescope suffers from flaky mountain power, so we have to do this sort of thing. The problem is sending a message that the power went out to the university campus from the mountaintop over a network that may not be working because the power went out. Many steps of communication depend on UPSes to hold up for a few minutes to get that email out. We have a big honkin' Liebert 40 KVA UPS to run all the telescope's computer systems between when the power dies and the big generator kicks in. It has the nice byproduct of AC mains voltage and current monitoring over RS-232. I expect you can buy a separate box to do this, but it has to be installed by an electrician to read current draw and probably is not cheap due to the required agency approvals. For monitoring whether there is mains power or not, a 110VAC coil relay plugged into the non-UPS outlet tells a computer that there is no mains power. Dirt-simple and reliable unless someone unplugs it or puts it into the UPS outlet. The relay's power cable has been wrapped in red tape and labeled prominently to help prevent tampering. The computer that does the monitoring is on a UPS behind the Liebert UPS, so it will work for a longer while after a power failure. A battery-operated data acquisition system would be better for long outages. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.