The Interruptable Power Supply

I usally goto my grandmother’s house for dinner, and today was no exception. On my home machine I’m busy compiling kde as part of a gentoo installation in a chroot on the hard drive I took out of my new laptop. So I try to check the status via ssh from my grandmother’s machine. No luck. I try ping. No luck.

Something must be wrong, I’ll figure it out when I get home.

I get home, and open the door. The whole downstairs is full of smoke. Not good. It burns my eyes and irritates my throat, but I venture inside and try to determine the source of this acrid atmosphere. I can’t find it, so it must not be that dangerous. I get some fans (no smoke in the upstairs) and open the back door, setting them up to blow the pollution outside.

My comuter is off, so I check all the electrical components and find that my UPS (CyberPower 1500AVR-HO) looks very unhappy (it’s a bit brown around the fan). I move all the plugs back into the mains, and boot up. Then I take the UPS outside and disassemble it, burning my finger in the process. The transformer is completely burnt up, and so is one of the resistors on the board above it. I guess it got too hot. It did get up to 107F today, and I keep my thermostat at 85F (because I’m comfortably warm at that temp), in addition I was doing some heavy compiling all day (which certainly increases the power draw).

It’s lasted about 2 years without problems so far. And it’s been running my main computer, a router, a cable modem, 2 LCD screen (one a 21″ widescreen) and a Terastation for the past couple months. I guess it just needed better cooling. So much for ‘uninterruptable.’