Remote Power Failure Alert System?

[Crushdepth]

Does anyone know of a UPS or other power monitoring device that can email/SMS a warning message if the power goes off?

I'm doing some lab work and the power went off over the weekend, probably because of the storm on Friday night. When I came in on Sunday morning the freezers had all defrosted and there was water all over the floor. Quite probably they have lost several thousand dollars worth of temperature-sensitive chemicals and biological samples that may be impossible to replace. Worst part is, nobody there seemed to care. There is an audible alarm on one of the -80C freezers but people 'didn't notice' it.

Any ideas?

[singa-traz]

APC should have what you need.

[monty]

I know several brands of alarm (home intrusion) systems having this function.

Apart from shooting of an SMS message when an intruder is detected, they can also send out an SMS when the power goes of and the alarm goes on battery mode.

Can't say I've ever seen a UPS with that function, although it very well might exist.

[Crushdepth]

Well I had a chat with APC and they said some of their 'smart' UPS have a slot where you can insert a network monitoring card (AP9618, about $US 540). This is capable of both pageing and sending emails, but the problem is that it doesn't do this directly. It needs a connection to the internet and it sends pageing messages by contacting a pageing gateway out on the web.

My experience with the uni's computer system is that it tends to crash out when the power goes down because some of the routers aren't on UPS etc. So I really need to find a way to do this over the mobile network if possible.

[Pushit]

You could use an intruder alarm that can call an alarm out on a phone line. This could be achieved by wiring a relay across an alarm zone. PM me if you are interested

[autonomous_unit]

If cost is not an issue, you could always combine a normal APC or other UPS and a small Linux PC with a GPRS Internet connection?

The usual APC UPS with the USB monitoring cable are supported by the apcupsd daemon on most Linux distributions. You can check the status of the UPS from the command-line or from scripts and then make it as smart as you want, i.e. only send an alert after the power is out for a certain minimum duration and/or the battery level is below a certain point.

I've never tried to control a phone to send an SMS, but you could bring up a GPRS link and send email or do any other sort of client-server interaction you wanted. With a cheap pre-paid SIM you could get a plan that will not expire for a long period but doesn't cost much to keep on standby, only bringing up the GPRS link when alerts are required. Or, for more sensitive monitoring you could get a better rate plan and have the box periodically send notices even when things are OK, so that your own machine could determine something is wrong when the notices stop arriving...

Good luck.

[Crushdepth]

Thanks. Budget is a problem (its not my lab so I'm reluctant to spend hundreds of dollars on it!). But I could donate an old PC from work. Alerts via email would probably be ok as I can get email on the phone. Can you get APC UPS in Fortune? I was looking for them in IT City etc the other day.

Went to the lab this afternoon, they said they have lost a lot of stuff. The power is still out in part of the building.

[autonomous_unit]

We bought ours from a small back-corner shop upstairs in Pantip Plaza in Bangkok. I don't really know where else they are available, but we just stumbled across this one that had them on display, including some APC boxes stacked in the walkway.

[niller74]

I have had good experiences with monitoring APC UPSs on a Linux box. With a few lines of code you could easily make it send a SMS or mail when the power has been off for more than 1 minute or so.

You want to look at 'apcupsd' for Linux.

[Crushdepth]

Thanks for your feedback. I did a tour of Fortune today and found only two fairly basic APC models in the whole place (at Data IT). Is there a better selection at Pantip?

[stumonster]

if you can find a UPS with serial interface you could also use NUT

you would also need the cheapest GPRS phone ( 2nd hand?) with USB cable to send with

The primary goal of the Network UPS Tools (NUT) project is to provide reliable monitoring of UPS hardware and ensure safe shutdowns of the systems which are connected.

http://eu1.networkupstools.org/

[Crushdepth]

Thanks Stu I'll have a look at that too. I've actually got a UPS with a serial cable at home (a Leonics) but the crapware that came with it never worked at all. Be interesting to see if some of these other tools do.