Hey, everyone! Thanks for the pointers regarding the servers and a UPS. Aside from simply powering off before a pending storm's arrival, there are other cases where power may cut off intermittently which can absolutely damage servers and corrupt data. The NAS just stores old footage and I've lost data from it before without serious repercussions, but you're absolutely right - it is good practice to keep systems like these attached to a UPS for graceful shutdowns and smooth power delivery. I'll be looking into a second UPS specifically for our servers and may follow up in a subsequent video.
You should host a "nut" server on something low powered like a raspberry pi that will send shutdown commands to all your servers. With it for example all of your high load servers can be shutdown after 60 seconds and then all of your low powered/critical stuff can be shutdown gracefully when the ups only has 240 seconds of power left
They did an excellent job for sure. Stem wall, concrete block exterior, etc. Built to withstand cat 5s. Just hoping I never have to test it through one!
Having your NAS on your UPS is still a proper way of working, especially when you have UPS monitoring in the NAS system, so the NAS can power off when the UPS signals the remaining power goes below a certain threshold. Without powering down gracefully, which you do this way, there is a chance a disk in the NAS gets corrupted, meaning you have to replace and rebuild that raid array again. You can of course power off certain systems manually when a disruptive event starts to take place just to be sure, but what I try to bring across is that an UPS is not just a big battery for systems connected, it also allows the connected systems (when they have the sensing for it) to power down normally before the battery is running empty.
I have a couple of suggestions for your setup because I live on the Gulf Coast too and have experience many hurricanes. The first thing that I would suggest is to look into a natural gas generator, whether that be a whole home or if you could convert that portable generator into a natural gas generator. Also, if you want to use the portable one, really this applies to both portable or the whole generator, see about have a transfer switch installed in your home. This transfer switch would allow you to directly connect the portable generator into your home power supply without the needs to run extension cables. You will just need that one transfer power cable that will go from the generator to the transfer switch on your home. Downside with the portable generator and the transfer switch is that you will have to pick and choose, which devices you want to run on it because of the limitation of the portable generator.
My goals would be to have a power shack with battery backup and a whole house generator like a generac that automatically kicks on after a few mins without power. Our neighbors have one and theirs was running during the storm so they were never without power.
Greg, get a EBM (extended battery module) for the UPS instead of getting a whole second UPS. It plugs into the main UPS and is just an extra battery pack and you get a bit more runtime with an EBM compared to another UPS
Glad you didn't have any major storm damage-though you should definitely keep the NAS plugged into the UPS. Even if you have enterprise storage adapters with built-in supercaps/batteries that will save writes in progress... there are a lot of ways you can end up with corrupt data (even if you're not editing when the power outage happens). The other advantage of plugging servers into UPSes is the much better power filtering/protection a UPS provides (even if you're going through something like a Tesla Powerwall!). My recommendation if you want more runtime for the WiFi especially would be to run two UPSes; one for the NAS and bigger server, maybe figure out how to configure it with 'Network UPS Tools' so it will shut down automatically / gracefully after a couple minutes.
Thanks for the pointers, man! Admittedly, the importance of old footage on my NAS is very low on the totem pole - which is why I was willing to be less careful about power backups for both it and our compute node. That said, I understand your reasoning. I'll see what I can do about running them into a separate UPS with custom shutdown parameters. That part is still very foreign to me.
@@GregSalazar Honestly NUT can be a little confusing even for people experienced with it! But it's well worth getting it working, plus you can do some content on it :) Main thing is to make sure you have backups, of course-for anything important to you!
We got hit by Helene, and was without power for 9 days, and internet was gone for almost 2 weeks. We've decided to start working on all the pain points that we experienced with the outage. We bought a charger for phones, and batteries for the many flashlights I have, (which came in super clutch). We got a small fan that has LED lights, and also has a power bank built in. It's funny that you mention the generator buzz, because we used that to put us to sleep at night. You don't realize just how dead silent it gets when everything is shut down, and we are the kind of people who run a stand fan in our room year round just for the white noise. Between the silence, the stagnant air, insane humidity, and how hot it got, getting to sleep was almost a Herculean feat.
Happy to see that you and your family stayed safe, you were lucky to not get any damage. Watching Hurricane Milton from Europe was scary, can't imagine how was it IRL. Honestly would like to see another video with adding ups, this server stuff is cool!
Every time I watch one of your Fix or Flop and PCDC videos, I always think to myself I wish I lived in Florida so I could get your help with my rig. But then I see a video like this and I'm lowkey grateful I don't. Glad y'all are alright down there.
Hey Greg, do yourself a favour and loose the cage nuts & screws by switching to Rackstuds. They make installing or swopping switches so much easier as the stud helps support the equipment while you are tightening the cap nut.
Highly recommend keeping everything on a UPS. If you lose power, whatever is not connected is a risk. I lost 4 servers and a NAS when someone hit a generator down the street and took out the power.
Glad to hear you're OK, Greg. Over here in central Seminole County we had 60-80mph winds but we didn't even lose power. I streamed all 8 hours during the worst of it. What a night.
It's definitely got one of the best climates. But your taxes and home prices are too high for my taste and business. I've tried to justify it in the past but it doesn't work out.
The fires are not our fault. It's mostly on federal land which the federal won't thin or prescribed burn. Calfire does a great job with state owned forest.
Watching from Bradenton. We got super lucky during Milton with no damage. We did lose power for about 3 days as well. I looked into an Inverter as opposed to a generator since they are supposed to be quieter. One was even "dual fuel" so it could use gas or a standard propane tank. Something to think about as an alternative until you get the whole home generator.
I am glad you and your family are okay Greg! I live in Illinois but my daughter lives in Port Richey, FL. Everyone is okay, but her mom and I were worried sick during the storm.
From the Netherlands, good to hear you and your family didn't had much severe damage from the hurricane and sadly this cannot be said for all the people who lived in the area where the hurricane has moved over. When the hurricane was on the news (yes, in the Netherlands, hurricanes in USA is usually a hot item) I was a bit scared that one of my favorite UA-camrs (and his family) would be hurt or would take severe damage from the hurricane but I am glad that didn't happen. 😊
TechnoTim has a couple good videos and blog posts on NUT, but I will say it's not for the noob. You can figure it out but I would definitely classify it as more advanced to get set up properly.
As others have said, I would still have everything on a UPS. I have my networking equipment on it's own UPS because I want it to stay up while the power is down and everything else is on it's own UPS to protect against voltage dips and momentary power outages.
There are a lot of whole home battery options that do not require solar panels to be mounted. With the right setup you can keep the generator around to help recharge when they're low. Plug in panels that you can lay out when needed for charging as a backup and some folks even use them as a way to save on their energy bills by running off battery power when rates are high and grid at night to recharge to full. Bluetti, Anker, & Ecoflow come to mind.
For whole-house backup, something like the EcoFlow Delta Pro Ultra could be a good solution. It's modular, so you don't have to buy the whole setup at once. Plus, you would plug it in where you would normally plug in a home generator (e.g. "breakout box"). Once up and running, you can buy battery modules to increase capacity as your finances allow. This keeps the costs more reasonable than an all-at-once built-in battery system.
You may want to look into a DAC (Direct Attach Copper) Cable when going between your UDM Pro and 48 Port switch. It will increase your bandwith between the two devices in giving you a 10G connection in everything internally. This may not mean a lot, but remember everything goes from the switch to the router and back. having a 10G connection will between the two will not slow down the network in things such as file sharing. you can saturate each connection, with no bottleneck.
if you have the room to install it in your yard. you should look into an auto start diesel generator. it sits on a concrete slab and you bolt it down. they are very large and can run your entire house.
You will definitely want to keep the UPS for the server even after getting the Powerwall installed. The powerwall cannot switch fast enough to be an UPS from what I understand.
I use a generac generator and installed a small propane tank just for it. It sat for a year then when i needed it, it ran for four days in a row no issues could not imagine not having it.
I'm just north of Tampa on the coast and lost power for about 24 hours. Spectrum was up before but I had no power to the router/modem at that point. Cell towers were completely useless during this though.
@GregSalazar IMO, you should keep your NAS connected to the UPS and trigger it to shut down in an orderly fashion after a few minutes of a power outage.
PROPANE... I keep 3 propane bottles in my garage and I have a generator that can run on either gas or propane. This way I can run my freezers, fridges, gas furnace heat (I live in North Texas) in the winters, and internet.
You should look into a whole home propane generator. Gasoline will go bad if it sits around while propane will not. The generator will be ready when you need it automatically. I would advise against a power wall considering what could happen if those lithium batteries cause a fire.
If you have run out of gas; remember your vehicles still have gas in them. Use a manual transfer pump designed for gas transferring. Grab a gas can and it will get you by a couple more days on your generator.
You actually should leave everything plugged into the UPS. That way for power loss you wont corrupt data possibly. To avoid wasting power on those devices though have a script run if there is power loss to send a shutdown command to non vital stuff. NUT (Network UPS Tool) ran on a Pi could do this.
Most servers have a USB or other solution to be told when getting UPS power and not grid. Connect everything to the USP and set needless servers to shutdown controlled after 3 minutes on USP power and the rest at UPS power 3% . You can also set boot up when power the UPS is back over 50% and charging from the grid. That way you have optimal uptime and no quick kill data lose. All the perks and no downsides.
Maybe propane or natural gas generator? I have a propane generator on demand that comes on when power goes out and the propane company monitors the amount I have so if it gets low they automatically come. Not sure what utilities you have down there but just a food for thought. Looks great man. House looks great also!
If you have Natural Gas in your home. You should definitely go with a NG power backup generators Pennies on the dollar compared to SOLAR. And it will always work. Will power your entire home. I live in Titusville and before I moved here I owned one up north and it was a blessing. Although I’ve always had Fiber internet everywhere I’ve lived when it became available “ I’m old “, it’s never went out during a storm. Only when they were doing maintenance or service after a storm. But imo a NG backup generator is way better.
Everything should be plugged into the UPS, but just with auto-shutoff options enabled when it detects a powerloss, letting it just loose power when the power goes make it prone to data corruption and power damage
I also choose to live here in FL mainly for the same business reasons as you said too since I do run a UA-cam channel but not as close in terms of subscribers and not paid by UA-cam yet.. but I do run a side hustle business but one day if it becomes big that I can make a living off of it then yeah that would be make sense here in FL. My family lives here in FL, plus I grew up here in fl ever since I were born. I totally agreed that you said you don’t want to live in the coast, especially for insurance cost and stuff. I’m planning on doing a similar homelab/ server setup as yours as soon as I move out of my parents home.
Regarding your UPS and servers, what happens if you are working on a server and the power goes out and the server isn't on the UPS? Also, brown outs for the servers. Depending if you are using HDDs you could have an issue. If you're writing data it will be lost and possibly what is on the storage might be corrupted. Brown outs can degrade server storage and components. At least if they are on the UPS, you have time to gracefully shut them down. Just removing them from the UPS may not be the best strategy.
What do you mean you don't have $80k lying around for solar?!? Jokes aside, glad you all are okay. The server rack is coming along nicely. UA-cam just suggested to me your first server build from last year so it's fun to see how far you've come
I would be more concerned with my servers going down hard than I would be about services being up. I would want to avoid data corruption. It is a home network after all not an enterprise network. You can survive an annoying power blip and have time to manually shut stuff down if the power actually goes out.
Respectfully Greg, Don't do this. The one thing you really want on a UPS is your servers. They protect from brown outs and the unpredictable power outages that can cause data corruption. You want them on a UPS so you can do a graceful shutdown if you lose power when not expecting it, and you might even consider wanting to power off your UNVR as well to prevent protentional footage corruption with a hard power off. I can't remember what OSes you're running on your servers but there are tools to automate shutting down when the UPS switches over into battery, You can even set it to shutdown as soon as power goes off to save as much battery as possible for keeping the network up as long as possible. My Suggestion is use one UPS for the servers, and one UPS for the servers.
Frankly you're better off with a 4G or better cellular connection as a fall-back. When cloud cover and rainfall are going strong you're not gonna get a signal. And that's me being an actual Starlink customer, because the other option I've had for years can't admit all the problems are on their end.
You could put in a battery system for way less than that $80k , you don't need the 'all everything' solution, just a 'sufficient for the Tech' solution , and it would be very cost effective!
i would be careful greg with that honestly i think elon will be selling all data coming through those starlink units to make up for what he had temporarily provided
Find a dual-fuel generator that can use propane. Propane can keep for a long time in the canisters. Not forever, mind you, but still a lot longer than gasoline. Meaning you can also stock up on it. There is some power generation loss to using propane, but it's a small tradeoff and arguably shouldn't matter. I have a dual-fuel generator simply because I don't want to handle gasoline, but still have the option if necessary.
If you have natural gas to your house you could add a natural gas generator to your line to power your house or your small appliances, that's what my mom's got.
NAS should be connected to the UPS and set to do a safe shutdown on a signal from the UPS. You'll kick yourself if you don't when you find you've lost data.
TBF, it's just old video footage. I've lost it before and it's no big deal since UA-cam essentially archives the important stuff (albeit, at lower bitrates). Still, though, I understand the approach you and many others are suggesting. Will see what sorts of UPSs I can add to keep the servers attached.
Here we are been fooled that Greg not much like RGB's anymore but made the extra effort to buy transparent cables to illuminate the RGB in he's server. I feel betrayed really 😆 stay safe always and also the family 💗
Think about the number of places that lost access to gasoline - especially if you need to refuel a couple of times over a week if you have an extended power outage. Gasoline is harder to effectively store.. Consider the duel or tri-fuel carb conversion kits for small generators - and allow the generator to run on propane. Storing propane for extended periods of time is lots easier, and getting replacement cylinders doesn't require the gasoline infrastructure to be operational.
I was initially opposed to storing propane on-site when we built the house. I definitely don't want a tank above ground either. Still not totally sure how I'll handle it moving forward. Part of me still wants solar.
For those around here, and the curious, SOLAR PANELS have functionally limited use, and during a STORM, they do nothing for you (must have sunlight to work), they are expensive, and most Solar Panels have a 3->5 year functional life span, and during a storm the damage they can take make their life and efficiency much shorter, so if people go Solar, they must expect to spend $5000+ every 3 years for fixing/care/maintenance on said solar panels, we tell people around where I live, to put aside $2000 every year JUST for the care/maintenance, and keep that money stored, prices and availability etc vary a fair bit for fixing/repairing so always overbudget just in case.
Just so we're clear, I'm obviously not expecting solar panels to generate power during a storm. That's what onsite batteries are for... _storing_ the power generated by the panels when it's _not_ storming. And with 3 Powerwalls, they predicted I could run the entire house for a few days. Longer if I cut off A/C.
Greg just get an ecoflow sponsorship massive battery back up two could probably power your fridges/Internet equipment for a day or 2. They make a hook up to the panel or you can just use them standalone.
You might not be editing videos during a storm, but if power goes out it can still corrupt data. I would suggest using a setup where you can immediately have those shutdown in the event of a power outage, rather than bypassing the ups. For whole house battery backup like the powerwalls, you need to pay attention to the cutover time, powerwalls specifically are too slow for computers to stay running, my solution since I have powerwalls, I just put small UPSs on computers. Also it is worth noting that solar prices have been in freefall for a while now, really, far cheaper than most people think. It is also worth noting that with whole house battery backup, you can use that to keep solar active, giving essentially unlimited backup power if the system is sized appropriately. That $80k quote was mostly powerwalls, about $60k of it, and that amount of solar sounds very excessive, though obviously I don't know about your specific usage or roof. For rack mount equipment I will recommend again rackstuds.
A Powerwall 3 is roughly 10K, not sure where you're getting $60K for 3. I know install and labor are added as well, but the solar panels and install alone were nearly 40K here.
@@GregSalazarThat is about what I paid for mine, that was a couple years ago and they are powerwall 2's. The solar system shouldn't be that expensive unless you have really excessive power usage or are way over specing the system. Hard to imagine with the current prices spending over $20k on solar for a large residential installation. My most recent solar installation was about $2/W including installation, before tax rebates, and the prices for that have come down very significantly since then. Edit: I was including total cost installed, including the switch panel, installation and everything for the powerwalls as I was charged for mine.
Cheapest option would be to get chinese inverter like easun with batteries 24v or 48v lifepo4 and make it work just as UPS mode. You don't have to connect solar. charging can be one from grid. Mine has conencted solar and with 24V 300Ah i can power 24h at least only from batteries
Solar panels battery packs for the whole house. Never be able to how electricity again. Unless a hurricane takes it out. insurance. not as expensive as people think. It's getting better and better on the price. Ok, one minute later, solar panel. Ok, so talk to the actual manufacturers of solar panels instead of the people who are trying to make 3rd parties three times over sales. It's much cheaper. You can get solar panels for like $250 a panel, then have smart. people who actually install it without price gouging. There are a lot of people in Florida who are looking for work. I will do just a fine job. who aren't large corporate mindset. I have plenty of family members who do things on the side but aren't corporate.
I like Greg, and blessings to his family. That said, this feels... Very 1st problems. But! This is because I don't know what his other businesses are. Through the lens of just this channel, hes just a tech bro that would be put off by the change in refresh rate between 60hz and 55hz 😂
Hey, everyone! Thanks for the pointers regarding the servers and a UPS. Aside from simply powering off before a pending storm's arrival, there are other cases where power may cut off intermittently which can absolutely damage servers and corrupt data. The NAS just stores old footage and I've lost data from it before without serious repercussions, but you're absolutely right - it is good practice to keep systems like these attached to a UPS for graceful shutdowns and smooth power delivery. I'll be looking into a second UPS specifically for our servers and may follow up in a subsequent video.
You should host a "nut" server on something low powered like a raspberry pi that will send shutdown commands to all your servers. With it for example all of your high load servers can be shutdown after 60 seconds and then all of your low powered/critical stuff can be shutdown gracefully when the ups only has 240 seconds of power left
Glad you're ok after the storm, you had awesome builders who built your new home
They did an excellent job for sure. Stem wall, concrete block exterior, etc. Built to withstand cat 5s. Just hoping I never have to test it through one!
@@GregSalazar it's mandatory from Florida to have hurricane resistant homes that are newly built?
Instead of spending $80,000 to get off the grid spin the $12,000 to get a whole home backup generator with a propane tank buried underground.
Having your NAS on your UPS is still a proper way of working, especially when you have UPS monitoring in the NAS system, so the NAS can power off when the UPS signals the remaining power goes below a certain threshold. Without powering down gracefully, which you do this way, there is a chance a disk in the NAS gets corrupted, meaning you have to replace and rebuild that raid array again. You can of course power off certain systems manually when a disruptive event starts to take place just to be sure, but what I try to bring across is that an UPS is not just a big battery for systems connected, it also allows the connected systems (when they have the sensing for it) to power down normally before the battery is running empty.
I have a couple of suggestions for your setup because I live on the Gulf Coast too and have experience many hurricanes. The first thing that I would suggest is to look into a natural gas generator, whether that be a whole home or if you could convert that portable generator into a natural gas generator. Also, if you want to use the portable one, really this applies to both portable or the whole generator, see about have a transfer switch installed in your home. This transfer switch would allow you to directly connect the portable generator into your home power supply without the needs to run extension cables. You will just need that one transfer power cable that will go from the generator to the transfer switch on your home. Downside with the portable generator and the transfer switch is that you will have to pick and choose, which devices you want to run on it because of the limitation of the portable generator.
My goals would be to have a power shack with battery backup and a whole house generator like a generac that automatically kicks on after a few mins without power. Our neighbors have one and theirs was running during the storm so they were never without power.
Greg, get a EBM (extended battery module) for the UPS instead of getting a whole second UPS. It plugs into the main UPS and is just an extra battery pack and you get a bit more runtime with an EBM compared to another UPS
came here to say this. Thank you! CyberPower makes it really easy too.
Glad you didn't have any major storm damage-though you should definitely keep the NAS plugged into the UPS. Even if you have enterprise storage adapters with built-in supercaps/batteries that will save writes in progress... there are a lot of ways you can end up with corrupt data (even if you're not editing when the power outage happens).
The other advantage of plugging servers into UPSes is the much better power filtering/protection a UPS provides (even if you're going through something like a Tesla Powerwall!).
My recommendation if you want more runtime for the WiFi especially would be to run two UPSes; one for the NAS and bigger server, maybe figure out how to configure it with 'Network UPS Tools' so it will shut down automatically / gracefully after a couple minutes.
Thanks for the pointers, man! Admittedly, the importance of old footage on my NAS is very low on the totem pole - which is why I was willing to be less careful about power backups for both it and our compute node. That said, I understand your reasoning. I'll see what I can do about running them into a separate UPS with custom shutdown parameters. That part is still very foreign to me.
@@GregSalazar Honestly NUT can be a little confusing even for people experienced with it! But it's well worth getting it working, plus you can do some content on it :)
Main thing is to make sure you have backups, of course-for anything important to you!
@@GregSalazar I bet @JeffGeerling could find you a networking guy to help with that stuff. 😀
Keep everything connected to the UPS device(s) and then you can gracefully shut down what you don't need when you have a situation.
We got hit by Helene, and was without power for 9 days, and internet was gone for almost 2 weeks. We've decided to start working on all the pain points that we experienced with the outage. We bought a charger for phones, and batteries for the many flashlights I have, (which came in super clutch). We got a small fan that has LED lights, and also has a power bank built in.
It's funny that you mention the generator buzz, because we used that to put us to sleep at night. You don't realize just how dead silent it gets when everything is shut down, and we are the kind of people who run a stand fan in our room year round just for the white noise. Between the silence, the stagnant air, insane humidity, and how hot it got, getting to sleep was almost a Herculean feat.
Beware, cable internet providers do not use backup power on their nodes. Only telephone companies do that, because it's regulated.
Which is why my backup provider is satellite, not copper ISP.
Happy to see that you and your family stayed safe, you were lucky to not get any damage. Watching Hurricane Milton from Europe was scary, can't imagine how was it IRL. Honestly would like to see another video with adding ups, this server stuff is cool!
Every time I watch one of your Fix or Flop and PCDC videos, I always think to myself I wish I lived in Florida so I could get your help with my rig. But then I see a video like this and I'm lowkey grateful I don't. Glad y'all are alright down there.
Hey Greg, do yourself a favour and loose the cage nuts & screws by switching to Rackstuds. They make installing or swopping switches so much easier as the stud helps support the equipment while you are tightening the cap nut.
Highly recommend keeping everything on a UPS. If you lose power, whatever is not connected is a risk.
I lost 4 servers and a NAS when someone hit a generator down the street and took out the power.
Glad to hear you're OK, Greg. Over here in central Seminole County we had 60-80mph winds but we didn't even lose power. I streamed all 8 hours during the worst of it. What a night.
Nothing beats the California weather even though we do get fires man made its still nice here.
It's definitely got one of the best climates. But your taxes and home prices are too high for my taste and business. I've tried to justify it in the past but it doesn't work out.
@@GregSalazar Agreed that's exactly why Republicans only should be running the United States Republic.
@@GregSalazarJust upgraded dedicated breaker from 25amp to 30amp.
@@GregSalazar Not only do I build gaming PCs Im a hvac plumbing and electrical technician 👍
The fires are not our fault. It's mostly on federal land which the federal won't thin or prescribed burn. Calfire does a great job with state owned forest.
I'm glad you made it through unscathed. I like your idea to have your different bits of equipment on different UPSs.
Watching from Bradenton. We got super lucky during Milton with no damage. We did lose power for about 3 days as well. I looked into an Inverter as opposed to a generator since they are supposed to be quieter. One was even "dual fuel" so it could use gas or a standard propane tank. Something to think about as an alternative until you get the whole home generator.
Happy to see that you and your family are safe after the storm.
Looking forward to the next video :D
Is that Starlink dish going to survive a wind storm?
I am glad you and your family are okay Greg! I live in Illinois but my daughter lives in Port Richey, FL. Everyone is okay, but her mom and I were worried sick during the storm.
I'm sure those LEDs will increase your battery time exponentially.
From the Netherlands, good to hear you and your family didn't had much severe damage from the hurricane and sadly this cannot be said for all the people who lived in the area where the hurricane has moved over.
When the hurricane was on the news (yes, in the Netherlands, hurricanes in USA is usually a hot item) I was a bit scared that one of my favorite UA-camrs (and his family) would be hurt or would take severe damage from the hurricane but I am glad that didn't happen. 😊
You should still keep everything hooked up, then integrate it with something like NUT to trigger a seamless shutdown of the array.
TechnoTim has a couple good videos and blog posts on NUT, but I will say it's not for the noob. You can figure it out but I would definitely classify it as more advanced to get set up properly.
House still standing.......at least the builders were good...lol
They are required to build new homes to be hurricane resistant in Florida. It doesn't mean they are immune to damage though
@@TheBlueBunnyKenthe wind is the easy part about a hurricane. Flying debris and water is another topic.
As others have said, I would still have everything on a UPS. I have my networking equipment on it's own UPS because I want it to stay up while the power is down and everything else is on it's own UPS to protect against voltage dips and momentary power outages.
Happy to hear you and your family are safe after the hurricane!
There are a lot of whole home battery options that do not require solar panels to be mounted. With the right setup you can keep the generator around to help recharge when they're low. Plug in panels that you can lay out when needed for charging as a backup and some folks even use them as a way to save on their energy bills by running off battery power when rates are high and grid at night to recharge to full. Bluetti, Anker, & Ecoflow come to mind.
Im currently studying Network+, its always fun to see your home server setup 💅
This stuff is really interesting, I seen numerous youtubers doing sponsorships with Ecoflow and other power station systems! Clean backup power!
For whole-house backup, something like the EcoFlow Delta Pro Ultra could be a good solution. It's modular, so you don't have to buy the whole setup at once. Plus, you would plug it in where you would normally plug in a home generator (e.g. "breakout box"). Once up and running, you can buy battery modules to increase capacity as your finances allow. This keeps the costs more reasonable than an all-at-once built-in battery system.
You may want to look into a DAC (Direct Attach Copper) Cable when going between your UDM Pro and 48 Port switch. It will increase your bandwith between the two devices in giving you a 10G connection in everything internally. This may not mean a lot, but remember everything goes from the switch to the router and back. having a 10G connection will between the two will not slow down the network in things such as file sharing. you can saturate each connection, with no bottleneck.
if you have the room to install it in your yard. you should look into an auto start diesel generator. it sits on a concrete slab and you bolt it down. they are very large and can run your entire house.
Another suggestion is a rack mounted ATS (automatic transfer switch) so you can have dual UPS's for all your network equipment.
The novelty of unpatching and patching quickly diminishes when you have to do hundreds in a wiring closet
That was like us when the power went down here in pasco the cell service was pretty much gone we couldn't even load a picture or do anything
Whole home generator FTW ❤. I live in The Villages
A standby generator is must needed thing in Florida every state has its own problems .
You will definitely want to keep the UPS for the server even after getting the Powerwall installed. The powerwall cannot switch fast enough to be an UPS from what I understand.
I use a generac generator and installed a small propane tank just for it. It sat for a year then when i needed it, it ran for four days in a row no issues could not imagine not having it.
I'm just north of Tampa on the coast and lost power for about 24 hours. Spectrum was up before but I had no power to the router/modem at that point. Cell towers were completely useless during this though.
Whole home Generac generator.
You could have power back in 20 seconds.
They work when tornados come through here in OK.
Everything in the house works.
Starlink is badass, can't wait to see a video about it
Good builders for the house help alot :D Also different color white lights for each room would throw me off lol
thankful that you're doing good! great video! keep going Greg!! and stay safe!
You don't like old people, may you be forever young.
Hahah on the roads, of course. So many old folks here can't drive worth a damn.
@@GregSalazar Aye in their minds the Victory Speed Limit is still the law of the land.
This takes me back when I was in tech school to get Cisco Certified.
@GregSalazar IMO, you should keep your NAS connected to the UPS and trigger it to shut down in an orderly fashion after a few minutes of a power outage.
Propane generators are the way to go Greg. Much easier to store fuel
PROPANE... I keep 3 propane bottles in my garage and I have a generator that can run on either gas or propane. This way I can run my freezers, fridges, gas furnace heat (I live in North Texas) in the winters, and internet.
You should look into a whole home propane generator. Gasoline will go bad if it sits around while propane will not. The generator will be ready when you need it automatically. I would advise against a power wall considering what could happen if those lithium batteries cause a fire.
If you have run out of gas; remember your vehicles still have gas in them. Use a manual transfer pump designed for gas transferring. Grab a gas can and it will get you by a couple more days on your generator.
You actually should leave everything plugged into the UPS. That way for power loss you wont corrupt data possibly. To avoid wasting power on those devices though have a script run if there is power loss to send a shutdown command to non vital stuff. NUT (Network UPS Tool) ran on a Pi could do this.
Most servers have a USB or other solution to be told when getting UPS power and not grid. Connect everything to the USP and set needless servers to shutdown controlled after 3 minutes on USP power and the rest at UPS power 3% . You can also set boot up when power the UPS is back over 50% and charging from the grid.
That way you have optimal uptime and no quick kill data lose. All the perks and no downsides.
I would also highly recommend some rack studs so don’t have to deal with annoying screws.
Thanks for the insight and sharing. How to prepare for future storms: leave the state.
Absolutely not. Florida is great for a number of reasons.
Florida is great for the simple fact Dems don't run it.
If you have natural gas thats another great option. Natural gas generator has been my backup for years, works great and its fairly cheap!
Maybe propane or natural gas generator? I have a propane generator on demand that comes on when power goes out and the propane company monitors the amount I have so if it gets low they automatically come. Not sure what utilities you have down there but just a food for thought. Looks great man. House looks great also!
If you have Natural Gas in your home. You should definitely go with a NG power backup generators Pennies on the dollar compared to SOLAR. And it will always work. Will power your entire home. I live in Titusville and before I moved here I owned one up north and it was a blessing. Although I’ve always had Fiber internet everywhere I’ve lived when it became available “ I’m old “, it’s never went out during a storm. Only when they were doing maintenance or service after a storm. But imo a NG backup generator is way better.
You can set non essential equipment to power down on mains power loss even if connected to a nas so the load would be lighter once they do.
Everything should be plugged into the UPS, but just with auto-shutoff options enabled when it detects a powerloss, letting it just loose power when the power goes make it prone to data corruption and power damage
I also choose to live here in FL mainly for the same business reasons as you said too since I do run a UA-cam channel but not as close in terms of subscribers and not paid by UA-cam yet.. but I do run a side hustle business but one day if it becomes big that I can make a living off of it then yeah that would be make sense here in FL.
My family lives here in FL, plus I grew up here in fl ever since I were born.
I totally agreed that you said you don’t want to live in the coast, especially for insurance cost and stuff.
I’m planning on doing a similar homelab/ server setup as yours as soon as I move out of my parents home.
Some UPS have extended batteries. Check your UPS model and see if there is one that is supported.
Hello everyone and I hope everyone is safe. Greg keep up the good work
Regarding your UPS and servers, what happens if you are working on a server and the power goes out and the server isn't on the UPS? Also, brown outs for the servers. Depending if you are using HDDs you could have an issue. If you're writing data it will be lost and possibly what is on the storage might be corrupted. Brown outs can degrade server storage and components. At least if they are on the UPS, you have time to gracefully shut them down. Just removing them from the UPS may not be the best strategy.
What do you mean you don't have $80k lying around for solar?!?
Jokes aside, glad you all are okay. The server rack is coming along nicely. UA-cam just suggested to me your first server build from last year so it's fun to see how far you've come
Hahah I appreciate that, dude!
I would be more concerned with my servers going down hard than I would be about services being up. I would want to avoid data corruption. It is a home network after all not an enterprise network. You can survive an annoying power blip and have time to manually shut stuff down if the power actually goes out.
Respectfully Greg, Don't do this. The one thing you really want on a UPS is your servers. They protect from brown outs and the unpredictable power outages that can cause data corruption. You want them on a UPS so you can do a graceful shutdown if you lose power when not expecting it, and you might even consider wanting to power off your UNVR as well to prevent protentional footage corruption with a hard power off. I can't remember what OSes you're running on your servers but there are tools to automate shutting down when the UPS switches over into battery, You can even set it to shutdown as soon as power goes off to save as much battery as possible for keeping the network up as long as possible. My Suggestion is use one UPS for the servers, and one UPS for the servers.
Frankly you're better off with a 4G or better cellular connection as a fall-back. When cloud cover and rainfall are going strong you're not gonna get a signal.
And that's me being an actual Starlink customer, because the other option I've had for years can't admit all the problems are on their end.
What Starlink needs is a “failover” plan. I don’t need starlink active all the time and pay $100/mo for it.
I hope you also have a firearm in case things get bad. Use a gas stabilizer when you store gas. Sta-bil is a good one.
8:45 Greg installs a primitive Cylon in his rack ....
I live near Tampa. Don’t make the same mistake I did and not test your generator prior to the storm. It needed a new carburetor.
Greg:
I suggest you get a whole home generator.
You could put in a battery system for way less than that $80k , you don't need the 'all everything' solution, just a 'sufficient for the Tech' solution , and it would be very cost effective!
i would be careful greg with that honestly i think elon will be selling all data coming through those starlink units to make up for what he had temporarily provided
Pretty much everything you do online with any ISP is vulnerable. I'm not the least bit worried about Starlink.
@@GregSalazar i personally dont trust elon i love tech but he gives off a terminator/skynet vibe
Find a dual-fuel generator that can use propane. Propane can keep for a long time in the canisters. Not forever, mind you, but still a lot longer than gasoline. Meaning you can also stock up on it. There is some power generation loss to using propane, but it's a small tradeoff and arguably shouldn't matter. I have a dual-fuel generator simply because I don't want to handle gasoline, but still have the option if necessary.
If you have natural gas to your house you could add a natural gas generator to your line to power your house or your small appliances, that's what my mom's got.
NAS should be connected to the UPS and set to do a safe shutdown on a signal from the UPS. You'll kick yourself if you don't when you find you've lost data.
TBF, it's just old video footage. I've lost it before and it's no big deal since UA-cam essentially archives the important stuff (albeit, at lower bitrates). Still, though, I understand the approach you and many others are suggesting. Will see what sorts of UPSs I can add to keep the servers attached.
Here we are been fooled that Greg not much like RGB's anymore but made the extra effort to buy transparent cables to illuminate the RGB in he's server. I feel betrayed really 😆 stay safe always and also the family 💗
Think about the number of places that lost access to gasoline - especially if you need to refuel a couple of times over a week if you have an extended power outage. Gasoline is harder to effectively store.. Consider the duel or tri-fuel carb conversion kits for small generators - and allow the generator to run on propane. Storing propane for extended periods of time is lots easier, and getting replacement cylinders doesn't require the gasoline infrastructure to be operational.
I was initially opposed to storing propane on-site when we built the house. I definitely don't want a tank above ground either. Still not totally sure how I'll handle it moving forward. Part of me still wants solar.
no power 8 days, missing a part of my roof, Tampa FL
Wishing you the best, man!
Sell that Troy-Bilt generator. ASAP... Get a Honda generator. I can't even hear mines running. 20 feet away. 80db vs 40db huge difference
For those around here, and the curious, SOLAR PANELS have functionally limited use, and during a STORM, they do nothing for you (must have sunlight to work), they are expensive, and most Solar Panels have a 3->5 year functional life span, and during a storm the damage they can take make their life and efficiency much shorter, so if people go Solar, they must expect to spend $5000+ every 3 years for fixing/care/maintenance on said solar panels, we tell people around where I live, to put aside $2000 every year JUST for the care/maintenance, and keep that money stored, prices and availability etc vary a fair bit for fixing/repairing so always overbudget just in case.
Just so we're clear, I'm obviously not expecting solar panels to generate power during a storm. That's what onsite batteries are for... _storing_ the power generated by the panels when it's _not_ storming. And with 3 Powerwalls, they predicted I could run the entire house for a few days. Longer if I cut off A/C.
Greg just get an ecoflow sponsorship massive battery back up two could probably power your fridges/Internet equipment for a day or 2. They make a hook up to the panel or you can just use them standalone.
Rack studs needs to sponsor this rack.
You might not be editing videos during a storm, but if power goes out it can still corrupt data. I would suggest using a setup where you can immediately have those shutdown in the event of a power outage, rather than bypassing the ups.
For whole house battery backup like the powerwalls, you need to pay attention to the cutover time, powerwalls specifically are too slow for computers to stay running, my solution since I have powerwalls, I just put small UPSs on computers. Also it is worth noting that solar prices have been in freefall for a while now, really, far cheaper than most people think. It is also worth noting that with whole house battery backup, you can use that to keep solar active, giving essentially unlimited backup power if the system is sized appropriately. That $80k quote was mostly powerwalls, about $60k of it, and that amount of solar sounds very excessive, though obviously I don't know about your specific usage or roof.
For rack mount equipment I will recommend again rackstuds.
A Powerwall 3 is roughly 10K, not sure where you're getting $60K for 3. I know install and labor are added as well, but the solar panels and install alone were nearly 40K here.
@@GregSalazarThat is about what I paid for mine, that was a couple years ago and they are powerwall 2's. The solar system shouldn't be that expensive unless you have really excessive power usage or are way over specing the system. Hard to imagine with the current prices spending over $20k on solar for a large residential installation.
My most recent solar installation was about $2/W including installation, before tax rebates, and the prices for that have come down very significantly since then.
Edit: I was including total cost installed, including the switch panel, installation and everything for the powerwalls as I was charged for mine.
Make the RGB red so it looks like KITT
OSRS eh?
So im guessing the compact wind powered generators are out of the question?
You can keep your hurricanes in the east. Being in Arizona.
yep got both
Greg - look into Ecoflow Ultra with variable amount of batteries for backup - thanks for your content
Cheapest option would be to get chinese inverter like easun with batteries 24v or 48v lifepo4 and make it work just as UPS mode. You don't have to connect solar. charging can be one from grid.
Mine has conencted solar and with 24V 300Ah i can power 24h at least only from batteries
Nice Vox amp.
Solar panels battery packs for the whole house. Never be able to how electricity again. Unless a hurricane takes it out. insurance. not as expensive as people think. It's getting better and better on the price. Ok, one minute later, solar panel. Ok, so talk to the actual manufacturers of solar panels instead of the people who are trying to make 3rd parties three times over sales. It's much cheaper. You can get solar panels for like $250 a panel, then have smart. people who actually install it without price gouging. There are a lot of people in Florida who are looking for work. I will do just a fine job. who aren't large corporate mindset. I have plenty of family members who do things on the side but aren't corporate.
I like Greg, and blessings to his family.
That said, this feels... Very 1st problems. But! This is because I don't know what his other businesses are. Through the lens of just this channel, hes just a tech bro that would be put off by the change in refresh rate between 60hz and 55hz 😂
Yep realized one of my UPS needed a battery it had 2 one cell was bad
dont waste money on a power wall, look up LF280K battery cells and build ur own power wall or use a seplos kit or somthing