Electrical problems!

S

SymbioticLife

New Member
Greetings all,
I have two wonderful lights 240W and a 400W. Have been using them for a while now and got the hang of it but now that i moved, weeee have a problem with our electricity in the neighborhood. What I mean is sometimes ( often) there are electrical cut outs in the whole neighborhood. Its a developing community so i understand that, but this is very bad for my lights. cause its not like the electricity shuts off for an hour or whatever so the lights have time to cool off, but it just shuts off for litteraly like seconds. and my lights try to restart rigth away but they gotta cool off first. What i was wondering was could i rig it somehow where there is a protection against this? i was thinking something in the lines of daisy-chaining some car batteries and putting them in between the ballast and the power source ( wall socket) I am no electritian so i am just daydreamig) oorr should i buy some Flourescent 400 watts and put em in the place of the 400 HPS? so if the electicity shuts off it wont damage the bulb like hps. All i know is that i am suffering and i need a remedy. haha cheers everyone, wish you a fantastic and blessed day. Thank you in advance for all the help
 
heya and welcome to 420magazine,
i would suggest you get yourself some computer equipment :)
an 'uninterruptible power supply (ups)' you can get them from amazon, apc is a well known brand, i would suggest approx 700w or even more watts as overloading those will cause the batteries to die sooner.
normally those are meant to keep servers stable and give them the time to power down while blackout and depending on its capacity you can get up to several hours out of those, as more sophisticated ones even uses external battery packs.

they can handle your load, give you the power you need for short blackouts, filter spikes and are usable as surge protection so you might want to take a closer look at these :)
 
You may want to reconsider... I'll share a long story to make a short point.

Backdrop... on the Gulf Coast of the US, we get frequent visits from storms. All our power and data infrastructure is above ground on overhead lines because our soil really sux.
Anyway, I was the IT lead for a ~30 person company. We were moving into a new space... expanding after a round of investment. I thought it would be a good idea to put a ups at every desk... hoping to avoid work interruptions during weather events. We bought quality UPSs from the leading company (APC).
I don't believe that I had a single one left in the offices after about 6 months. While they failed in various ways, it was mostly due to battery failure. These things sucked horribly. I was so sorry we had spent that money. I had a huge stack of them in back of my office forever.
The lesson I took away from the experience.... these things are just not worth the pain and money. They're not dependable at all.
And keep in mind... this is just powering a computer and monitor.... I bet your lights chew up more power than a desktop.

2 cents delivered. Happy growing!
 
i'm using an 1500VA apc ups on my 1kw gaming rig, works fine ... battery condition is at 92% after a year of usage never had any issue with any upc other then battery failure after at least a year of usage ...

dunno about any gulf leading company, but in the hardware forum where i'm active, one of Germanys biggest, mostly apc is recommended for ups and no-one ever had such a bad experience like 30 ups failed within the first 6 months of warranty ....

edit:
of course that doesn't mean they're faultless, higher temperatures might degrade them faster and so on.
i can't say anything about the conditions they were used in nor do i know what desktop computers were used, actual desktop computers can run below 100w even with monitor while servers and my gaming rig are drawing much more power then office machines and i don't know if such thing has also an impact to ups battery degradation .... :)
 
Perhaps it was some environmental issues (humidity... temps), or maybe their frequent exercise. And yes, one can chase down the warranty and hold the company's feet to the fire, but one learns over the years that loopholes, shipping charges, and time wasted often render such warranties functionally pointless. And yes... the equipment was APC gear.
Like I said... in the end, for us it was all a pointless exercise is wasting time and money while the gear ended up as doorstops and closet fodder very quickly.
 

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