I have several UPS devices hooked up, but it doesn't capture super brief flashes of outages. What are people using to capture brief outages which would cause the UPS to beep, but the NUT server doesn't refresh in time to capture the event?
#Power outage monitoring - how to see or track very brief outages?
stoic gale
late moth
Stick a microphone by the ups?
stoic gale
yeah that would work but no way to track / alert of that lol
late moth
Use esphome to listen for a beep and trigger a button entity
scarlet bone
Is the UPS networked, and able to send a notification of some sort when there's a power cut? Or is it USB and reliant on other tools to poll it?
stoic gale
nah they have rj45 connections but thats for protection not monitoring
burnt ruin
If you're measuring voltage you will see it on there
scarlet bone
ah, I've only ever worked with proper networked UPSs, not the USB monitoring some of the consumer ones offer, so don't really know how the software works with those.
burnt ruin
But maybe it's a false alarm?
stoic gale
ah, I've only ever worked with proper networked UPSs, not the USB monitoring som...
they poll for data every few seconds. its not constant. and some of my UPS will fail and glitch offline if you poll it too hard
so if you get a 1 second power blip, it wont be detected
other than my room beeping from 4 UPS going off
scarlet bone
Yeah, my next question was about to be could you just run some local software that polls way more often, and pushes a notification, rather than having the full polling handling it at whatever frequency it operates at
stoic gale
they just go unavailable if you poll too much.
burnt ruin
I seriously doubt you have outages that are only seconds long
stoic gale
i had one this morning where they all beeped for maybe 1-2 seconds from a slight outage
but it wasnt enough to kill lights and stuff
burnt ruin
are you monitoring voltage?
stoic gale
I seriously doubt you have outages that are only seconds long
the old town i lived in would disagree with you on this lol
scarlet bone
although even our commercial UPSs are not perfect, they'll send an email that voltage or frequency have gone out of range, but not specify which, or high vs low, and then notify for recovery again so quickly that even their internal data logging won't actually show anything happened
stoic gale
are you monitoring voltage?
yeah theres no change sadly
burnt ruin
yeah theres no change sadly
then it's a false alarm.
stoic gale
every UPS in the house went off at the same time lol
scarlet bone
then it's a false alarm.
You can't say that with certainty, it's still dependant on what frequency you're monitoring voltage at...
stoic gale
we totally have "second-long" outages here. sometimes so fast the lights dont even have time to turn off fully before power comes back
scarlet bone
If voltage is only being monitored & logged every 15 seconds, and you have a voltage drop for 10 seconds, you can drop out of range, have devices turn off, and the power can be back easily before your next data point is logged
stoic gale
thats basically whats happening
even the power monitoring zigbee plugs i have didnt show a break in the graph
burnt ruin
none of your voltage graphs show anything? ever?
burnt ruin
yeah what I mean is that it could be a voltage sag, that would trigger some kind of threshold and cause the alarm to go off. If you measure voltage fast enough you will see that
stoic gale
yeah i bet if i had a meter on it, i would have seen it drop a tiny bit
would have to be refreshing less than 200ms i bet to catch it on HA
i had to set some of my UPS to like 15-20 polling rate because NUT server freaked out and they went offline
late moth
I wasn't just being a dick when I suggested using an esp32 to monitor your ups outputs - either a microphone listening for a beep or a light sensor looking for a flashy light are both relatively easy to implement
stoic gale
I wasn't just being a dick when I suggested using an esp32 to monitor your ups o...
I will look into
That is a gray area for me so I'm not sure where to get started or how to configure that.
jolly delta
On the Esp route, you can have an optocoupler for monitoring power off and use that as a trigger. But you got to learn some basic electronics stuff for it
lucid river
Do you live in an area with a lot of PV installations around you?
What is your line voltage on any of the UPSs or on your plugs?
lucid river
I meant how is spreading in time, look at your graphs. Do you have any peaks/spikes close to your beeping issues? A UPS not only will trip for a power loss, but for over voltage as well. If you are living in an area where a lot of Photovoltaic installations are connected to the grid, and the grid is not stable enough, you might have micro outages or spikes as PV sources kick in or drop out.