Sick Days, Spoiled Milk, and a New UPS for the Homelab
Today was one of those days. Work from home, technically, but I still had to tap out and rest because I felt sick as a dog. In and out of the toilet more times than I'd like to admit. Pretty sure it was the milk I drank, it must have gone bad. No warning, no drama, just betrayal. Toilet here, toilet there, toilet everywhere. Wherever and whenever it decided to strike.
Other than that, today was pretty boring too. Normally I'd kill some time playing Valorant, but my current company (hi Cody) can actually see my gaming history, so that's a hard no during work hours. Just putting that out there in case anyone's wondering why I'm not queuing up.
The Bluetti Purchase
To make the day slightly less boring (and slightly more productive), I bought a Bluetti power station off Facebook Marketplace for 13k. Brand new, technically, though the seller had tested it himself first since he got it on a discount from somewhere. The plan is for it to act as a backup UPS for my already existing UPS, because apparently one point of failure wasn't enough for me.
Funny enough, meeting the seller threw me off a bit. The guy clearly looked like a foreigner, not in a bad way, just wasn't what I expected. Then he starts speaking Bisaya, and speaking it well. Wasn't expecting that at all.
Speaking of points of failure, you should see the wiring behind my servers. It's genuinely disgusting. A rat's nest of cables that somehow still works, and I have no plans of cleaning it up anytime soon.
Anyway, here's a look at the Bluetti app. I've got it set to a minimum charge of 80% with bypass battery mode on, so it stays topped up and ready to kick in the moment the power drops.
Here's the part that surprised me: my server pulls over 100 watts just being turned on. That's a lot more than I expected. And even when my Unraid box is mostly idle or "off," it's still sipping at least 50 watts. Servers really don't know how to rest, unlike me today.
Do the Math
The unit itself only has 288Wh of capacity and can charge at up to 600 watts. Running at 100 watts of load, that gets me about 2 hours of runtime. Good news is, most power outages around here max out at around 2 hours anyway, so this should actually cover the gap.
Realistically though, my servers won't see that much downtime, at least not from power. The real threat is the internet. If the connection goes down, it doesn't matter how much battery I have, the websites are still going offline. And if that happens, you can bet I'll be ranting about PLDT on socials.
Still, this little power station means my portfolio site and the rest of my self-hosted stuff have a fighting chance during a blackout, which is more peace of mind than I had yesterday.
One Small Hiccup
Since the seller tested it out himself before selling it to me, I can't register it under my own account just yet. He needs to unbind it from his account first. Waiting on that now. Hopefully it doesn't take long, because I'd like to actually own the thing I paid for.
That's today. Sick, bored, but at least my homelab is a little more resilient now. Small wins.
#Homelab #SelfHosted #UPS #Bluetti #PowerBackup #SoftwareEngineer #Cebu #DevLife