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Comment by alentred | Hacker News Reader

> My office was wired with two sets of electrical sockets, one connected to grid mains and the other connected to the UPS (for important equipment only).

This I think is a standard practice in any large office building in France (Europe? Global?) too, regardless of the frequency of the power cuts. I don't remember witnessing any power cuts in the office (not since long ago anyway), but in most of the places there are systematically white and red sockets, red ones being powered through a UPS. So, server machines go into red ones. Well, we don't have servers anymore, but the sockets are still there anyway. Hopefully UPS too, LOL.

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I've never seen them in France. I've seen them in a chemistry lab section of a university in New Zealand and I believe they're also common in data centers, NOCs, etc. worldwide.

I think it depends on the building. A typical inner Paris office (converted Haussmann building) won't have it usually, but traditional larger offices I have been to have sockets like this one for example: https://www.legrand.fr/pro/catalogue/triple-prises-de-couran...

US typically has the whole office with UPS and diesel generators (if it is important enough to do so).

No, this isn't remotely "typical." You have no idea what you're talking about.

The building might be on a generator. The whole building is most assuredly not on UPS.

Even in hospitals only certain outlets are on UPS - the stuff that absolutely cannot be interrupted - though a lot of hospital equipment now has its own battery system, at least in part for convenience.

I don't know if it's still done but semiconductor plants used to use intertia-based grid smoothing/UPS systems to handle millisecond-level interrupts and voltage fluctuations.

Agreed. Nothing actually typical at all for regular "just offices".

I do remember working ~25 years ago at a place that did have those two kinds of outlets. Our computers and monitors would be on the UPS+generator ones, while desk lamps, office lamps etc. were not. But it was specifically because the offices were on-site w/ the two data center complexes the company had and the building I was in happened to also be wired into that whole setup. Not every other one was either, only that one and the 24/7 NOC.

I only knew this was a thing because my office mate's computer was in the wrong kind of socket. One day his lamp stayed on while the computer turned off and for me the other way around. Soon after we heard the diesels starting and had to close the window coz of the fumes.

At full capacity of the data center, the absolutely huge UPSs could run the data center for all of 10 minutes. So that's how long the diesels had to actually start and take over.

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