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Comment by jmnicolas | Hacker News Reader

> Six years without a power cut doesn't seem too surprising.

It depends where you live and / or you might not notice them if they happen at night.

Even in France which is supposed to be a first world country I experience a couple power cuts every month (twice at night this week-end, it killed my tile generation and corrupted my filesystem on my OSM server).

I probably should invest in a UPS instead of complaining on HN !

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Every month is not normal at all. You should check with Enedis.

I live in France and my power cuts are less than 10 in +20 years.

Had +5 years of uninterrupted power at my previous place and at the current flat I live, it's currently at +1,5 years.

Conversely, I live in SoCal and every month is very normal.

The only power outages I have here in Socal have been scheduled, and they replaced several poles and cabling. Out for like 8 hours.

Yeah that doesn't sound right at all. I live in UK, we have maybe 1-2 power cuts a year max. And I have equipment running 24/7 so I'm sure I'd know.

Maybe they happen when I didn't notice them but in 15 years of living in Austria & then Germany I think the number of power-cuts I experienced would be countable on the fingers of one hand.

A couple a month seems way too much to me. I know for sure my last one here in southern Germany was more than 5 years ago. The only one that I actually remember experiencing during daytime was in my childhood, more than 20 years ago.

Here in Czech Republic it is also very infregvebt to have aby non-planned power cuts.

At our home we had one, in 2004.

I'm intrigued by these typos. q to g, u to v, n to b. Are you using a handwriting recognition system, by any chance?

Just typing too fast on the default keyboard of Sailfish OS running Xperia X. :)

Wow, I thought power in France would be great. I'm in NZ, and I'm sure I've gone six years without a power cut. I have a PC that's always on (no UPS), so I'd definitely notice.

The power in France is great, I never heard anyone have so many cuts. The only cuts I encountered is from falling trees due to lots of wind the winter. Otherwise I can count the number of cuts on two hands for the past twenty years.

On the other side of the Tasman they're pretty common due to summer storms. In Queensland having candles ready when we sat down for dinner was an almost daily occurrence some months, the PC and just about everything else would be turned off and unplugged by then. The best nights were when the power went early and we had an emergency Barbecue.

Over the years it got more reliable but I'm not sure if that was universal or just my specific area getting a lot more built up.

I'm in Queensland and haven't experienced any power cuts in the last 5+ years.

Until the relatively recent planned power outages because of fire risk, here in Northern California (an hour north of SF) it was once every year or two.

If I had to guess, I would think it's wildly variable based on location and the factors of that location. A more remote community with one main power line through forested area might experience power loss more often, and a larger city with higher density probably has its own problems with load spikes which may cause problems. Maybe a suburb or medium sized city with semi-recent infrastructure is actually the sweet spot for power reliability?

Here in Gilroy (southern end of the Bay Area) we get one or two outages a month during the summer. Unless it's a planned rolling blackout due to heat, they're usually only a few minutes in length, at least. The Costco-special UPSes I use (CyberPower 1350VA units) have all proven adequate for keeping my work/compute infrastructure online.

I've got solar, though, and a house battery is very much on the list once my budget allows it. I don't see local system stability getting better any time soon, and likely worse now that PG&E has more leeway to shut down power during wind/heat events and the like.

I don't remember a power cut since I moved to my flat in a big city 11 years ago. I would most likely notice because I run my server almost 24/7.

Every month sounds very bad, even when I lived in a countryside in the least wealthy EU province (Lubelskie, Poland) it was never this bad. Maybe once a year (and usually with a warning that it will happen).

It also depends on the status of your local grid/substation. My university was on the same local distribution as a nearby hospital. The hospital had special status for receiving power, for obvious reasons. So in the 10 odd years I spent doing undergrad and post grad studies there was only ever 1 brief power outage during a thunderstorm. Meanwhile nearby suburbs probably averaged 2 power outages per year, typically for a few hours at most.

The power is very reliable until I install a solar panel and feed to the grid. Every time a thunder storm I have to worried as it would happen. Got 2 ups in the house until they reroute the power arrangement in the house so isolate the solar with the household main (by doing something about the fuse sensitivity level). No thunderstorm for sometimes. Still awaiting.

Power is a funny thing for computer guys.

I have lived six years at my current location in Germany and have not had a power cut, except for a burned fuse in my apartment.

I grew up in a small city in Ireland and power cuts were a couple of times a year thing.

I now live in Dublin and I've had one in 6 years.

The only one I can remember in recent times - say the last 10 years or so - is when they did “something” out at the Facebook datacenter in clonsilla ...

Yeah, twice in the same weekend is the trigger condition to go ahead and buy a small UPS (or several, depending on how your computers are arranged). Be sure to get one that communicates, usually via USB-HID, so your computer(s) can shut off cleanly if the outage is long.

Power cuts every month doesn't seem very normal to me. I had a home server running for a few years without UPS, and at one point it had over 2 years of uptime.

That's too much. I live in Spain and the last power cut was maybe last summer. It's probably less than once a year on average. Maybe way less, but i'm not sure.

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