Working when the power goes out

Recently, a subscriber to a list I'm associated with asked about how to deal with power outages. "All along, we've had a generator in place to run the well pump, furnace, refrigerator, and a few lights, which has worked fine during the outages. We can run the computers off the generator. However, the power fluctuations make it too dangerous, so we only boot up for 5-10 minutes once a day for e-mail and weather updates. I've heard about line conditioners without knowing exactly what they are, how they work, or what to get, how much. I've also heard about mini generators that serve household electronic use. I'm also thinking about getting a laptop with a really good battery. But how good are good batteries? Which option, which expense, makes the most sense?" I had an answer, but it wasn't the best answer.

First, here's my answer: This is a really good question and I've given it some thought. The suggestion about working from a library is excellent if the library still has power. If the event is really widespread, that might not be the case. So I'm going to assume that you can survive for a few days without the Internet and that all you need is the ability to use a computer for work that's already on the computer.

I say that because if the power outage is widespread, Internet service that's provided by cable or WiFi will be AWOL. If you have dial-up service, it will work so long as the ISP has backup power of some sort the the connection to the Internet is powered. You probably can't depend on that being the case.

The simplest method to explain and implement is to use your existing generator. Yes, these things have significant power fluctuations, so what you need is an uninterruptible power supply. This is a device that plugs in to a wall outlet. A good UPS unit will provide 20-30 minutes worth of operating power for a desktop system. During that time, you can get the generator going. UPS units (check the specifications) should be able to handle reasonable fluctuations in voltage and provide clean power to the computer.

Use the UPS unit and the generator for only the essential gear. A printer is not essential and should not be plugged in to a UPS unit. At least not a laser printer. If you have a dot matrix printer for proofing, it won't cause a problem, but lasers draw far too much current during startup to run on most UPS units.

The most power efficient computer will be a notebook unit, but if you don't routinely use that as your primary computer, your work files will be on the desktop and you'll need to move them to the notebook computer. If you have an external USB drive that you use to mirror working files from a desktop unit, you could take the USB drive and the notebook computer to a location that has power. (This is similar to what I did when I had hardware problems recently. My work files were all on an external drive that I plugged in to a laptop and was back in business within 5 minutes.)

Most laptop computers have space for a second battery (usually it takes the place of the CD/DVD device). Given your location, it might make sense to obtain a second battery for a laptop computer. When commercial power is out, you could use the computer in its most conservative mode and, with 2 batteries, expect to get 8 to 10 hours worth of operation.

Don't store a lot of fuel in cans. Besides the problem with gasoline going stale, there's also a fire hazard. Instead, obtain a siphon and use it to remove fuel from your car in time of need. If you keep a full-size vehicle fully fueled when bad weather is anticipated, you should have at least 15 to 20 gallons of gasoline. That's enough to run a generator for a long time.

Alternatively, you can run a notebook computer (or even a desktop system) from your car. This can be more than a bit cumbersome, but you could use the car to charge a notebook computer's batteries. To run a laptop computer that needs AC would require a power inverter; this is a device that plugs in to the DC circuit in your car and creates (a small amount of) AC power. This would not be my first choice.

• Good article on inverters
• Decent article on UPS units

That's just the beginning

Another subscriber asked her husband, who spent his entire working life dealing with machines and electricity. He wound up a specialist in industrial process controls, installing, calibrating, and repairing them. He also worked as a straight electrician at various times, ran a wrecking yard, and had a small construction company that went under when the local copper mines went on strike. In other words, somebody who really knows how these things work.

The rest of this section is a quotation from the response. I asked for permission to post it here, with attribution, but I've been asked not to disclose the writer's name. So here is the word from Katie's husband, Bill (as written by Katie):

Build your own UPS.

You'll need a battery charger, at least one semi-tractor 12 volt battery (but see below!), and an inverter. This converts 12 volt DC to 120 volt AC.

After asking him various questions, I found out there is a unit, made for use on boats and in RVs and cabins, that combines the battery charger and inverter. It's lots more expensive, though, around sixteen hundred bucks. He doesn't like it because of the cost, and because if something goes wrong with the unit you have to replace the entire thing. Bill always thinks in the least expensive terms, how would he build it for the two of us.

This also goes for the battery mentioned above. That's the least expensive option and it's how Bill would do it. But if you get those, you'll have to have the charger and inverter outside all the time. Part of Bill's original answer involved describing how this needed to be protected from the weather but not fully enclosed or air-tight. It also requires a hole through one wall of your house, out to the charger/inverter. So I'll describe this first, and a slightly more expensive way that removes the need for putting a hole in the wall.

You build enough of an enclosure to make sure snow or rain won't hit the equipment, but make sure it's well-ventilated. The type of battery required for this version is the type that are used on the big semis. They are big, they are heavy, and they generate hydrogen. I think that's the gas he mentioned; it wasn't in his original notes. In any case, you do NOT want them inside.

Your battery charger will have a power cord; this can be fed from the main power line (via an extension cord) or your generator. You'll need to run a line from the battery to the inverter. Finally, you'll also need a heavy-duty extension cord from the inverter into the house, into a power strip you can use for your computer, monitor, etc. That's where the hole in the wall would come in.

The slightly costlier version uses the type of battery you'd need for that sixteen hundred dollar self-contained unit. That's the sort of gel battery that you can actually use safely indoors. These, though, cost around $500, as opposed to the regular truck batteries, which Bill thinks are around $200.

So bring it all inside. When the power is on, you can charge the battery (or batteries; if you can afford it, I suspect two would be better) from the house current. When the power is on, you can move the charger outside and plug it into the generator.

The charged battery is then hooked up to the inverter, and the extension cord runs from the inverter to your power strip and computer. Bill recommends you use this all the time, by the way. He says the inverter/battery makes up a UPS, and this evens out any fluctuation in your line current better than any power strip. You can keep one battery working while the other one is charging.

The battery charger should be about a hundred bucks; the inverter may be four or five hundred. I've already discussed the prices of the batteries. If you wanted to get the all-in-one charger/inverter, you'd still need to buy the batteries, and I *think* you'd have to get the gel-type. (Bill's asleep, so I can't ask him.)

He says that a fully-charged 12 volt battery, either the gel-type or truck battery, should have enough juice to run all of your equipment for twenty hours or so. For a long outage, you could recharge via the generator.

Finally, he says that if you're interested he can get you sources for all of this, along with toll-free numbers. He also points out that he did all the pricing for this from ONE catalog, so there may be other options. Just as a general disclaimer, he's not connected to any of these companies, except that we get too BLOODY many catalogs from them all. When did catalogs become a monthly rather than annual phenomena?

Questions and Answers (well, 1 question & 1 answer)

We're going to be migrating soon from Comcast for our ISP (at home) to Verizon. Our problem is what to do with e-mails we want to save or port over to the Verizon server. We're going to have some overlap in service until we're sure everything is OK with the new system.

Anything you've received (assuming POP3 here and not IMAP or Web mail of some sort) will stay where it is--on your computer. When it comes to "change of address", any good ISP *should* do it as a matter of course so that messages would follow you. In fact, few of them do, so you'll need to take care of that on your own.

You should be able to use the same e-mail program and just change the existing account or add an account.

I'm pretty sure this is a Web mail issue in that we log onto Comcast through a Web browser and all messages are in their respective folders regardless of which computer I use. (Eudora, Outlook, etc., aren't being used with this.)

So, given this info, what say you?

You have just described the one great benefit of Web mail. But it's also one of the primary disadvantages: You won't have a way to transfer those files to the new provider. You could use Eudora, Outlook, or whatever application you prefer to download the files to a local machine. They would be on only one machine, but you would have them. After you leave Comcast, Comcast will delete the files.

I am assuming that Comcast allows you to connect to the e-mail server with a POP3 client.

I imagine so. There are directions for using Comcast with Outlook and Eudora, so...

That will work, then. Until you leave, you can set the mail application to leave messages on the server. That way everything will be the same until you leave and you'll have all the old mail on the local machine.

Applications for Windows, OS X, and Linux

Continuing the look at operating systems, this week we'll consider office applications, website editing applications, browsers, antivirus programs, photo editing, and other applications for each of the platforms. What begins to emerge is a picture that appears to have more points in common than differences across the platforms.

This is not intended to be a complete and exhaustive list of all types of applications or of applications within the various types. It is primarily intended to show that nearly any task you need to complete can be accomplished on any of the 3 major computing platforms. You may find some tasks easier with a particular application on a specific platform, but other applications on other systems can still deliver similar results.

Nerdly News

If you haven't visited a library recently, now's the time to go

An article in the Washington Post this week described some changes at the Loudoun County library, which began offering online books to its patrons in 2000 and put audio books online for downloading onto an Ipod in 2005. "It reached another digital milestone this week," wrote journalist Tracy Woodward, by becoming the first library system in Northern Virginia to offer MyLibraryDV, a video-on-demand service that allows library card holders to download hundreds of hours of video.

That got me to thinking just how much libraries have changed in the past 10 years or so. The Worthington library, when we moved here, was in a building not a lot larger than the library in the small town where I grew up. We had one of those box-like Carnegie libraries—children's books in a room to the left of the main entrance, adults books to the right, and reference materials behind the librarian's desk.

The Worthington Library was a building with class and a lot of open space. Books were shelved (2 levels) on the outside walls and the center part of the building was open, 2-levels tall. I don't remember whether it was part of the Columbus/Franklin County system at the time; probably not because in the early days of Internet ubiquity I remember it being associated in some way with the Westerville library.

The library moved to its present location and the building was substantially larger. Then the Worthington library, which had joined the Columbus/Franklin County system built a large new library on Hard Road. Next, the library bought more property beside the building in Worthington and doubled the size of the new building. Now (and for the next year) what I think of as the "new" library, but what many consider to be the "old" library, will be undergoing expansion and renovation. There simply is not enough room for everything that's needed.

The Worthington Library is the 2007 Library of the Year (a national award). It is open 7 days a week during the school year, 6 days a week in the summer. The last time we were in NYC, I made sure that Kaydee and Phyllis saw the inside of the New York Public Library's grand building on 42nd Street. A petition drive was underway to convince the powers that be that the library should be open 6 days a week. What's up with a 5-day library week?

There's no streaming video from the libraries in central Ohio (yet), but Worthington has a decent DVD section, the Upper Arlington library has a much wider selection of videos, and the Grandview Heights library (long known in the area for its AV collection) is probably a bit behind Upper Arlington, but it's part of a library system that reaches into Fairfield county and sometimes has access to materials that might not otherwise be available. The libraries also have books. Lots of them.

Yes, I do have 3 library cards in my wallet. And I love it.

Opening another front in the battle against Microsoft

Top execs at Microsoft could be forgiven for developing a bunker mentality these days. They've been battered by the European Union. Vista hasn't been adopted as quickly as they had hoped. Google and others have free on-line programs that compete with office. And now Opera is trying to get Microsoft to include more than just Internet Explorer with Windows.

This week Opera filed a complaint with the European Commission that says Microsoft is abusing its dominant position by tying Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system and by failing to follow "accepted Web standards." Opera says the commission should compel Microsoft to give consumers a choice and to support open Web standards in Internet Explorer.

In my opinion, the most recent version of IE is largely standards compliant and anyone who wants to obtain Opera or Firefox (or any other browser) needs only to download it from the Internet. Opera's CEO Jon von Tetzchner, says that Opera is "a champion of open Web standards and cross-platform innovation." That is true. Opera has a browser that runs on nearly every platform and it was one of the earliest adherents to standards set by the W3C.

Opera says the commission should require Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows or to install other browsers on the desktop and that the commission should require Microsoft to follow "fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities."

Opera Software is a Norwegian company. Its browsers run on all types of computers as well as many cell phones and portable media players.

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