Power outage behavior

[Stevewins]

Last night the major ice storm here in the Midwest knocked out power for 7 hours. Transformers were blowing up and lighting up the sky all night long, it was like the Fourth of July.  I have a battery backup on my Arlo base station but not on my router. I expected that my VMB 5000 base station with SD card would continue to record clips during the outage, even though I couldn’t view them yet without the wifi connection for the base. However, the base did not record anything during the outage. Shouldn’t it have?

[StephenB]

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@Stevewins wrote:

Last night the major ice storm here in the Midwest knocked out power for 7 hours. Transformers were blowing up and lighting up the sky all night long, it was like the Fourth of July.  I have a battery backup on my Arlo base station but not on my router. I expected that my VMB 5000 base station with SD card would continue to record clips during the outage, even though I couldn’t view them yet without the wifi connection for the base. However, the base did not record anything during the outage. Shouldn’t it have?

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If motion was detected by one of your cameras, it should have recorded on the microSD card.

[Stevewins]

That’s what I thought. Maybe my battery is worn out. I’ll do a power outage simulation and see what happens. 

[jguerdat]

We happen to have few power outages of major length but my 750VA UPS died much quicker than I had anticipated a couple of years ago. I had figured on at least a few hours but got less than 1 hour. I have my modem, router and hub connected to it so I guess I need to revisit power consumption.

[StephenB]

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@jguerdat wrote:

We happen to have few power outages of major length but my 750VA UPS died much quicker than I had anticipated a couple of years ago. I had figured on at least a few hours but got less than 1 hour. I have my modem, router and hub connected to it so I guess I need to revisit power consumption.

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The UPS battery does degrade over time, so you might want to check if it is user-replaceable.

[jguerdat]

It's been changed. I have APC UPSes which all have replaceable batteries. I have no idea at this point how old the battery was - could have been recent or old then.

[StephenB]

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@jguerdat wrote:

It's been changed. I have APC UPSes which all have replaceable batteries. I have no idea at this point how old the battery was - could have been recent or old then.

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Power use does vary quite a bit for different routers (and perhaps modems).  But I think 30 watts total is a reasonable estimate of what a modem+router+base would use.  A 750VA UPS should give at least 2 hours at that load (per the APC calculator).

[Stevewins]

Mine stopped recording immediately, right after the outage began. 

[jguerdat]

Did you try the power outage simulation you mentioned earlier?