Power.

[synaesthesia]

I posted in Hardware a couple of months ago about a surge in popping power supplies of late.

 

However, clearly something else is up, and I'm not the only one that's noticed it with my company.

Just going round my 15 or so schools and looking at the APC UPS logs. I believe there's a limit for how much voltage can be shoved down your line - a Google around shows between 216 and 253 volts.

However, just about all of my sites are reporting voltages of getting damned near (and in one case over) 260 volts. 254/255 is average, and naturally some of these UPS's are going barmy, trimming power spikes every couple of minutes.

 

Anyone else been picking this up in the Northants or surrounding areas? We've been getting our schools to contact their energy suppliers pronto to get them to sort it out, and can only hope they'll actually do anything about it.

[Edu-IT]

I noticed this a few times during the summer, but nothing of late. I'll check again though.

[GrumbleDook]

Yeah, Ifor told me about this last week and I am trying to chat with Buildings & Capital Development about it. It is quite worrying really that some power inputs into school buildings appear to be over the limits ... I'll let you know when I have more info but if folk in Northants have more examples of this I would be very interested.

[garethEds]

I'm not in the same area but we get nasty power surges in and around my school. We've had to put all the switches onto UPS. The servers were on anyway but we've never done switches.

 

When it does happen we have to reset everything. Our central CISCO switch (which is LEA provided) has a fit. We need to get a UPS sorted for this.

 

I went back today do discover the power had blown over the weekend.

 

GJE

[percy]

We are having trouble with our power too (Northampton). It seems that we suffer the worst spikes between midnight and 6am each night, when the power is exceeding the recommended limit for the majority of that time.

[Andrew_C]

between midnight and 6am each night, when the power is exceeding the recommended limit for the majority of that time.

This is clearly when the least power is being drawn, allowing the voltage to rise. You need to get your electricity supplier in NOW to put an accurate logging device on your system for a period. They won't readily accept the data from the UPS as it won't be calibrated, but it should be enough to get them to look at it. You need to get it done soon, as that time period will soon be loaded more heavily as people turn their off-peak heating on.

 

The sub-station transformers have different taps on them, so it should be possible to alter your voltage. Problems arise if for example you are the first building on a long cable. They need the voltage high at your end so that it remains within tolerances at the far end.

[INeedAUsername]

I have had the same for about 6 weeks - im in Birmingham; until the sparky onsite told me another school was having the same problem.

 

A few days on and no surge reports or anything

[synaesthesia]

Just a bit of an update on this. Recently things seemed to have calmed down - every other post on our RM Support Calls wasn't Event Master whinging about UPS voltages. I don't know if anything's been done; the 2 schools where it was worst both spoke to their energy suppliers and told it "would be looked into" but noones had further contact to confirm or deny anything being done.

[percy]

Ours (Parklands Primary - Northampton) has been much better since December - Only a couple of small spikes over the last 6 weeks.