Intimately familiar with the challenges of storms, having lived in North Florida since 1948 except for 20 years away in the Army. I very much understand the problems and their solutions. However the technologies which most of us have embraced for information, entertainment, and communication quite often do not have procedures and equipment in place for outages longer than a few hours at best. Of course, it all comes back to $$$$ and lots of it. When preparing your infrastructure for storm damage sustainability, there is no immediate ROI, unless a storm conveniently comes just as you finish the project, as my British friends would say, "Not bloody likely!". We have a policy at my home, we never let our fuel tanks sleep at less than 1/2 tank, which most of the time will get you enough miles away to find a source of fuel. Of course, those who have embraced electric vehicles are in big trouble because the charging stations are tied to the fail infrastructure as well. Like you, Scott, I have plans for whole house generator with large propane tank, but also like you have not had it in the budget yet. As I age, I see more and more need for it, though so I will accelerate the budget process by cutting back on the "wants" and focusing on the "needs". Something our younger generation has some difficulty comprehending. I like your idea of the self-hosted wiki with vital information available provided you have the backup power to run it. Sounds like an incus container project to me. I recently acquired a mini-pc recommended by Brian and populated it with 4 2TB SSDs. It seem to perform wonderfully so far and consumes a thimbleful of power compared to some other competitors in that market. I started it off with a Pi-hole install which is now doing my dns and ad-blocking, and my next project is NPM and Bitwarden and several others. It seems that the NPM is critical to the performance of my homelab, Of course, I will have some server backups of all of my homelab items which stay offline except for actual backups. I am also setting up a couple of servers at another property about 5 miles away in case of a local disaster at my home office. In addition, sometime this year I hope to have a robust backup server at my son's home in Knoxville for a true offsite backup that would still be available if I lose everything locally. Well, I am not finished rambling on yet, but I must cease for now and get some of this stuff done, since it is raining and hot outside preventing outside work. I am happy you came through unscathed relatively speaking. Of course I am sure you have made preparations for portable power for your wife's medical device in the event of another storm. I vividly remember 2004, when we have 4 hurricanes hit Florida, one which hit twice! We were without power for a week, then. Best Regards, Jim
@donaldhoudek2889
Ай бұрын
Scotti, I know what you were going through as I live about 200 yards from the Gulf of Mexico on the Florida side. Granted, we are usually spared, but in 2004 and 2005 we had a bunch of hurricanes come across the state and not up the gulf. We lost power for a couple days but survived. We still had cell service. I had a small 500 watt inverter that I connected to the van and used for the Fridge/TV/Fan, not at the same time. So with the potential of more busy hurricane seasons we decided to come up with a plan for protecting the house, emergency power, water, food, and of course Internet for communications. I just purchased a 12.5kW dual fuel Westinghouse portable generator, wired in generator receptacle by the service panel, purchased an Automatic Transfer Switch, and tested it out. I can run the whole house and the AC, the HVAC has a Soft Start unit on it, to reduce the inrush current (compressor startup load) from 90.5 amps down to 30 amps on start up. Amazing! I am trying to get a EG4 6000XP whole house inverter which unfortunately is on back order till September, so that will require a plan "B" of a smaller temporary 48VDC inverter, but I will stick with the 48VDC LifePO4 battery banks. I may purchase a Star-link setup and activate it only during hurricane seasons, the wife thinks that is a good idea. We purchased a load of dehydrated food and canned goods, a couple 5 gallon bottles of water (water cooler type), all the basics. To give you an idea as to how high our property is, well it is 18.5 feet above sea level. Not much.
@scottibyte
Ай бұрын
You are where I want to be in terms of a generator in about year. I just have to get the money.
@PopularWebz
Ай бұрын
I would be surprised if a UPS worked with the Westinghouse portable gen. Open-frame generators produce a very dirty sine wave such that the UPS will act as if power has not been restored and die after 20 minutes. You can of course get active UPS devices that always invert, but it is often more cost effective to just get an inverter generator than to source an active UPS.
@scottibyte
Ай бұрын
@@PopularWebz That's what I was thinking. My son-in-law did have stable power that ran his computers. My goal in the next 18 months will be to be on a whole house natural gas generator. In the many hurricanes here, we have never had a natural gas outage when the power has gone out.
@donaldhoudek2889
Ай бұрын
@@PopularWebz The EG4 6000XP is an off-grid whole house inverter/charger and also has a generator receptacle mounted in the case. It works perfectly with using a generator as a main power source for recharging the EG4 battery banks. I wish that they were not on back order. Will purchase a temporary inverter/charger until I can get one.
@PopularWebz
Ай бұрын
That is pretty scary I wouldn't want to be trapped anywhere for 3 days. Also a self-hosted password manager is not really critical in this situation because you should have a local copy of all that data synced to your devices (between the phone apps, desktop clients, and browser extensions). I would also highlight that having critical services on a low-power device is a way to extend your runtime when not on shore power. Also, offsite backup is critical. And perhaps there is a service you could host that caches local forecasts from the internet. Of course this would go stale quickly but it may be good to have a rough idea of what was expected.
@scottibyte
Ай бұрын
So, the self hosted password manager (like a public cloud hosted password manager) benefits from locally cached copies of passwords and keys. The difference is that if you want to make changes in the data, you cannot do so while the public cloud is offline. I am the king of low power solutions and I cannot agree enough. All of my services are hosted on extremely low power servers. The possible downside is that my large scaleable disk storage is on spinning drives on two NAS's. The NAS's are low power, but the spinning drives eat a lot of power and generate much heat. Heat is never our friend in south Texas and without self-generated power and most importantly HVAC cooling, we are in a bind. Thanks for your insights.
@Vincats8
Ай бұрын
Have you thought about Starlink?
@scottibyte
Ай бұрын
Yes, sadly Starlink has ground based station infrastructure that suffers the same outages. That and Starlink avoids population dense customer locations like here.
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