How do you keep your home servers online during powercuts?
I live in a part of the world where powercuts are pretty frequent. 1 per day is normal. They last between 1 and 8 hours. A day without powercuts feels like a special occasion.
My machine is powered by a desktop ups which is terrible. It is only supposed to power everything for a few minutes to shutdown safely. But it is cheap and I don't know much about other affordable alternatives.
How do you folks who self host at home deal with powercuts? Any recommendations? 8 hours of uptime from a ups sounds almost impossible or totally unaffordable to me.
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More info on how you built your setup please
It’s very homemade, but I believe it’s built like a DC net for a boat. It’s a bluetooth connected lithium battery, boat cabling and fuse boxes and Victron charger and voltage transformers.
I built it with “subnets” for different voltages. The battery is 24 V which feeds servers and a 34” monitor, then a transformer to 12 V for network gear, and several 5 V (USB) for a rack of raspberry pis. The is also a small 230 V transformer, for some gear that have built in PSU.
The largest server is fitted with a custom DC PSU I found on e-bay, others are normal external PSU where I cut the cables.
That's impressive! In your experience, how does the lithium battery compare to a lead acid one?
I don’t have a good link to share, but from the research I did the difference is huge.
LiFePO4 batteries have a higher capacity, longer lifetime, safer and higher power to weight density. Many come with built in communication, like my bluetooth connection.
They are also expensive, but for my use case it’s much cheaper over time. I use about half a charge per day, which this battery should be able to sustain for 5-10 years. A lead acid battery would probably last months.
Forgot to add that a big part of the setup is in the battery controller, which I built on my own. :) That was a very fun project, and now the battery is fully automatic and charging is based on hourly price and the power provided by my solar panels.