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Power Outage Takes Down Systems

A power outage struck parts of South Anchorage and the Anchorage Hillside a few days ago.  The outage took down a few of our hillside assets for about 2 hours because they don’t yet have backup power systems installed.  In particular, both of our Hillside Mesh Nodes were hit at the same time and were down for the duration of the outage.  This outage basically took down the southern half of the MESH as each of those two stations provide critical relay between the south and north parts of town.

Not to worry.  No damage was done and equipment is already in hand to remedy the situation.  We’ve acquired “buck” DC voltage converters which will let us take 12 VDC from a battery on site, step it up to 24 VDC, and input that to the Power Over Ethernet injectors for the Ubiquiti MESH nodes. 

Ultimately, we hope to equip all MESH nodes with either a UPS to run the Ubiquiti supplied active POE injectors, or with the Buck converters to run off battery power.

Mother nature is keeping us on our toes.

73,

Kent, KL5T