MAE-East still no generator

Sun Sep 8 21:16:55 UTC 1996

> Just out of curiosity, does anyone have any personal experience with
> losing utility-provided power more than, say, three times in a day?

Yes.

Thats why we have two util feeds to an ATS, then to a generator w/
and ATS and two UPS's.   There are two substations in our area, an
east and a west. On any feed failure we switch to the other feed.
We start the genset if the UPS comes on and run it for 10 min,
regardless.  Our experience has been that if one feed goes down
the other remains but has an occasional blip.  We have see the
ATS go back & forth a up two *four* times during a 24 hour period.
The genset had about an hour of runtime for that day.

                                   +------+    +---+
                                   |Genset-----|CTL|
                                   +------+    +-|-+
                                      |          |
East Substation  ---- +---+         +-|-+      +-----+ -- DCREC --- DC FRAME
                      |ATS| ------- |ATS| ---- |UPSx2|     ||
West Substation  ---- +---+         +---+      +-----+ --- AC ------ AC GRID

We a just a little ISP, not a major interconnect point.  But, to coin a
marketing phrase, "all reliabilty starts with the power."