Running a PC without mains electricity
 

I am trying to figure out a solution for a little problem I have. Very soon, I am returning to my homeland and starting small hosting company. The problem is that sometimes the electricity supply in my area is very unpredictable and prone to going off for hours. Does anyone know of a suitable solution to run a PC without using mains power, or would a UPS suffice for my needs. Another option I have is to use solar electricity, which I may end up doing if everything else fails.

If you are running a hosting company, your pc would probably be the least of your concern- or at least it will be once you have customers.

Typical enterprise setups are a diesel fueld backup generator wired with 3 Phase(A,B,C) power detectors connected to 75KVa UPS which connects to the servers/workstations.

If this isn't what you're talking about, you can just slap on an overpowered UPS and disconnect the sound alarm on the speaker. Something in the realm of 3000Va or 3Kva would keep you up for an hour. http://www.powerware.com/UPS/9120_features.asp

Solar power connected to deep cycle batteries would work but would cost much more than the UPS. And the right way- the generator- would cost even more than that. Something in the realm of $50,000. The UPS, something in the realm of $1500-$2500. The Solar array that actually works with proper wireing, about $6,000.

There is no cheap solution to having no power for a long stretch.

I do have customers at the moment but most of their sites are hosted on my reseller and virtual hosting accounts (I develop/desing their websites and host them as well). I don't think I need gear for enterprise level hosting, just something suitable to run a few servers that may host up to 100 to 250 small websites across the servers. Maybe I'll just get solar electricity installed instead, so far it seems the decent option coz it may be expanded if need be. Diesel/Petrol generators seem to be a good backup solution though and thanks for mentioning them coz I had never thought of considering them as an option.

Are you needing electricity for yourself only or for others as well.

If for yourself, then you can buy 24 Volt to 240 volt converters with battery backup. Essentially you run off the mains, but when the mains fails you switch over to battery. Now I know this sounds like an UPS but it isnt, because a ups has a built in battery. But these units are the converter only - you supply the battery.

If you provided some truck batteries, your system would run for hours on battery and when the mains comes on it charges the batteries.

If you go this way, your converter must supply pure sine wave output, most converters of this type supply square wave output and that will stuff your computer gear.

some good info here

http://reslab.com.au/resfiles/raps/text.html

good luck
floopy

spelling edited

I would definately go with the generator. UPS is a good option. but good luck getting 4 hours out of it.

Yeah basically it's for myself. I need to be able to have one mail server and 2 webservers up and running most of the time, thats why I am exploring other solutions coz I would obviously lose customers if they couldn't access their email or websites due to power outages. That converter thing sounds like a good idea and I had been considering it as well, but don't know much about them. I'll go on the web and checkout some prices.

If this is for a business you definitly should get a battery backup unit to keep the servers running until the generator kicks in.

Ok, thanks a lot for the comments and the links. I have a good idea of what I need to do now, so I gotta analyse the options and the cost to see which method would be most suitable for me. Thanks :)