Quick electronic/UPS question:
The power company has informed me that the power is going to be out tomorrow for five consecutive hours in the smack middle of the day.
The UPS I run has enough juice for an estimated 4-5 hours. Meaning it might make it, or it might run dry before the power comes back, depending on how fast the power company does their work.
Should I turn the UPS completely off before the outage? Or is it safe to let it run, even if it happens to hit 0% power?
I'll be at work, so I won't have a chance to monitor the situation locally. I usually have everything 'off' while at work, but the wifi router is on the UPS, and my desktop computer is modern enough that it's never really 'off', so the UPS would be powering *some* stuff.
My main concern is that turning off the UPS means effectively disabling my whole network - which includes security cameras and alarms - for the *entire* day, rather than the maintenance period.
@Phorm The battery the on the UPS is rated for a specific % of drain. Sometimes that's full watts sometimes less. if you're running a bunch of low power stuff off (a PC in sleep counts) it you should be ok. I'd still recommend turning the PC entirely off though
Many thanks! I will be turning the computer as completely off as I can. I think I may even flip off the PSU switch, even if that does lead to some weirdness on restart.
The problem is that I'm not sure what % my UPS is rated for - and also, not sure exactly what % it will reach tomorrow. The duration they're quoting is 5 hours, but it could be more, or less.
@Phorm If your PC cares about the PSU switch being flipped when it's off you have a very strange PC setup or are actually using hibernate :)
@Doephin
It's mostly on startup for some reason. Any time the computer loses power completely, on the next restart it'll start up - then before the monitor gets a signal, it'll shut off, then start up again and boot as normal (though it'll take more time than normal).
I'm pretty sure I've disabled hibernation - I manually force a full shutdown every time I turn off the computer (by holding shift when powering down).