tallgirl
Senior Member
- Location
- Great White North
- Occupation
- Controls Systems firmware engineer
So, while I was gone I spent a lot of time learning everything there is to know about photovoltaics and started to write software that will monitor and control a PV system.
One thing I learned is that there are a lot more very short power outages than I imagined. Which means, putting in code to notify someone when the power goes out means figuring out how long is "out" before it's really "out".
Does anyone here have any guesses as to how long the power can be out before it should be considered "out"? I see a lot of 1 and 2 second outages, and then they are all much longer -- from a few minutes on up. Would a 5 second outage be a good clue that the power is going to be gone for more than a few more seconds? Anything longer than that and I risk not being able to send an e-mail to a pager because the network infrastructure might fail as well. But too short and someone gets paged every other day.
One thing I learned is that there are a lot more very short power outages than I imagined. Which means, putting in code to notify someone when the power goes out means figuring out how long is "out" before it's really "out".
Does anyone here have any guesses as to how long the power can be out before it should be considered "out"? I see a lot of 1 and 2 second outages, and then they are all much longer -- from a few minutes on up. Would a 5 second outage be a good clue that the power is going to be gone for more than a few more seconds? Anything longer than that and I risk not being able to send an e-mail to a pager because the network infrastructure might fail as well. But too short and someone gets paged every other day.