Sharing power quality data

Sven Nielsen dalvenjah at DAL.NET
Fri Apr 6 17:34:09 UTC 2001


This is of course the extremely low-end of power quality data gathering,
but I've thrown up the scripts I use with apcupsd and rrdtool to grab the
power quality info from an APC smart-UPS in the San Diego, CA, US area.
They're at http://www.foxfire.net/volts/; my graphs are also up there.

If nothing else, this may be an easy way to 'webify' a subset of the data
to facilitate sharing. (note, I don't consider 120+/-5V to be much of an
issue...but the fluctuations are interesting.) They're also only as
accurate as whatever the APC uses to gather its data. But it works.

I don't have the time to support the scripts, unfortunately (mails asking
for help with them will be ignored), but they're simple enough that you
should be able to figure them out with access to the RRDtool documentation
and the README I've stuck in the package. Egregious errors I've made will,
of course, be fixed if someone tells me about them. }:>

If anyone is particularly interested I could start a link farm of other
power quality graphs such as these on this set of pages; I'm not sure how
much of that would be considered 'proprietary data', though.

-Sven

On Thu, Apr 05, 2001 at 08:33:23PM -0700, Sean Donelan put this into my mailbox:
> 
> Most of us collect a lot of data with power quality meters from our point
> of view of the utility grid.  But since none of us share information, none
> of us really knows what the whole picture looks like.  A few miles a way
> the major regional power outage may show up us just a blip in the data.
> And unless you were looking specifically for it, you might not have noticed.
> Nevertheless, the additional data might help with the analysis, if you knew
> who to ask to get it.

-- 
 Dalvenjah FoxFire (aka Sven Nielsen)  "It brought me a Mr. Potato Head,
 Founder, the DALnet IRC Network       Scully. It knew that I wanted a
                                       Mr. Potato Head!"

 e-mail: dalvenjah at dal.net             WWW: http://www.dal.net/~dalvenjah/
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