Back-up power

At a meeting today, our president, talked about upgrading our system by installing a back-up power. No details were given to the type battery, natural gas, etc. Some of my co-workers were up in arms, I was just woundering what everyone's thoughts about having some type of back-up power, and what are the pro's and con's.

Do you mean...Stand-by???

Well, it's a great idea, if your company will spend the bucks on the right equipment. We mostly still have Alpha 6015's still, considered old nowadays, and I guarantee you we spend more money on truck rolls daily with inverter cards saying, "CHECK INVERTER", than if they had spent the money replacing them with XM2 models, which we have in about a 1/4 of our system. That is with status monitoring telling us that. Instead of putting more power supplies out there, they decided to have any power suppy with 12 amps of draw or higher have a top hat installed, for three more batteries, for more run time. Not to popular with us or power who does not want that much weight on their poles. Believe me our power supply guy has a bunch still needing top hat's, but budget will not allow for any more to be installed. Why are we doing phone for then???? Latest halarious idea is now instead of placing another power supply somewhere, which desperately need's one, they decided the new standard is to just bump up to 75 or 90VAC, to make it work, and it will stay like that permanently, unless engineering really over extends, and then we are really up a creek. Has already happened. From what I have had to deal with, powering is everything, so if you have an engineering group in your office, I hope they are very aware when they design an area, or keep adding to, they keep power in mind, because our's have not in the past, and still to this day do not. I like the propane idea. We almost got that for just the node's alone, but scrapped. One of our other system's have propane backup, and they are great, and seem reliable from what they have said. Best thing their's were 100% on the ground. Doing the multiple battery thing is ok also. Just more batteries to keep on top of, plus having a bucket will be a must for those. Main thing, from our experience if they are planning to keep older power supply equipment, there will be added daily maintnenance for sure. Odd thing though, with us Alpha 6015 transponders in our power supplies have way less trouble, than our Alpha XM2 transponders. Give or take I guess. If you are going backup, whatever you do, talk the decision makers out of those Alpha 6015 model's. Yes Alpha does still offer them, and make them. We have blinking red lights on ours every week because of faulty inverter cards or modules. We are up in arm's ourselves about not getting rid of them. Very costly to maintain, and repair costs are through the roof. As for con's you may not be as busy when there is a power outage, depending on how good your batteries are doing, and duration of outage. Plus the cost of batteries, a battery tester which is very expensive, but a must, and I do not mean a toaster, plus face shields for all who will be working with batteries. MSDS sheets, or whatever you have to carry on your trucks, if you are planning to carry a certain amount of batteries in your truck. I think it is great they are wanting to go that route. They will need to add some help, if they want to keep the system reliable. If you are already scrapped for help, then someone is going to have to do routine maintenance on them twice or more a year. Batteries may be the cheaper way to go. If they go as far as status monitoring, you can get away with just three battery backup, and hopefully depend on your call center or who ever to alert you when there is a major alarm, such as commercial power out etc. That would be possibly the cheapest, and most reliable way to go. Plus you are keeping on top of the plant issues better that way. You can see batteries acting up months before you would normally go out to do routine maintenance. Meaning better reliability, and happier customers! Lastly if you have any poweing issues, get those resloved with them, so they get all that taken care of in your upgrade. Less stress down the road! Hope that helps.

UNLESS YOU ARE LIKE OUR LOCAL CATV OUTFIT....PUT A GENSET ON A POWER SUPPLY, DURING A OUTAGE...............WE...POWER CO.... HAD THE POWER BACK ON IN ABOUT AN HOUR.................I HAD BEEN HOME 3 HOURS WHEN THE CATV GUY CALLED AND ASKED....HOW LONG?............HOW LONG FOR WHAT? WAS MY REPLY......................HE SAID THEY WERE STILL OUT, SO I HEADED OVER TO THEM, AND LO AND BEHOLD, OUR POWER WAS GOOD............THEY HAD BURNED 5 GALLONS OF GAS FOR NOTHING

In our system, there are no longer any supplies that aren't at least standby capable. All the node locations are XM2's and several trunk stations also, not only for the standby but for the status monitoring as well. When a supply goes into inverter it lets us know about it so that we can dispatch someone to either power it off a gen set or their truck.

There has been some talk about possibly moving to centralized powering with the (possibly Alpha powernodes?), but nothing really serious just talking about some kind of LP/Natural gas backup. We're also moving to 90V powering in a lot of our areas because of the ability to have lower draw and larger power realms without the cost of needing to add more supplies.

The only problem with standby powering is when you're doing storm resto having enough generators to get all the supplies off of inverter! We got caught off gaurd a bit this year by the severity of the storms up here.

Why were your co-workers up in arms? Would they rather roll out to babysit a generator?
Back up power rocks and when you provide more and more advanced services you have to start thinking of your up time more and more.
Now Docsis monitoring enables power supplys.. thats a handful. Little alarms all day long when your standbys are in use, or are low and need maintenance. Most of the time its the status monitors that need maintenance, not the PS. :(

I'm having Alpha XM2 stand-by P/S installed as we speak...

Hey SS,
In Montgomery Alabama I was working for a system called knology.
They had Power supplies that had battery standby and also had natural gas hook ups.
They where prepared. They where running phone service, CATV and Internet.
They also had a system monitoring called the chetah net?

WP

Are Cheetas still in use???

We have Cheetah transponders in our nodes alone. May have one Cheetah transponder act up every 4-6 months. You see alarms here and there, but for the most part, you can clear them from the Net Mentor program, I believe they call it. Do not get to touch it yet. Our supervisor is very picky on who knows how to deal with it. He looks at it while he is off the clock. He will catch stuff before the SOC does. And he tells me I need to get a life!

Hey Splicer,
Not for sure if they still use it? This was several years ago that we installed them?
Probably not the latest and greatest anymore

WP

We have Cheetahs in our system, which they still continue to use...however they are not functional right now. Something is wrong with the "hex" program and since it's no longer supported, we have little status monitoring available. I wish someone would pick them up on the grey market and support them again.

As for power supplies, Alpha XM2 is the way to go. That's what all of our new nodes are being built with. We use 3 XM2's per power supply with 16 batteries in the cabinet. Pretty slick.