Perspectives

I have started a journey of entrepreneurship recently. It has’nt been that long but the transformation it has had on me is hard to ignore. It is satisfying to have “aha” moments many times in a single day.

I have had many frustrating/saddening experiences in these last few months, but nothing comes back to irritate me as much as power cuts. Philosophically, I wondered who should take responsibility for my frustration and I could not find an answer. Not the BESCOM guys. Not our politicians, maybe, us, for having grown to a billion people. I decided I am the one who is accountable and decided to find a solution. The cheapest and quickest solution.

Being a technology entrepreneur, all I missed during power cuts was internet. Laptop was on battery and would run for a couple of hours and that was enough to juggle through. In my case, Internet was a wifi router and a modem. Both DC appliances with less than 10 VA (turn your device around and you will find a voltage and ampere specification. Power would then be Volts*Amperes) consumption. To power them, I should be able to buy a few re-chargeable batteries and load them on to a battery tray and that should do the trick. Batteries (cells) come with a certain voltage specification (typically 1.5v). But my internet devices had an awkward voltage requirement that wasnt a multiple of  any battery’s voltage specification I found in the market (Thippasandra). Half a day wasted.

Next, I wanted to get an Old desktop UPS and hook it up to just these DC appliances. A PC ups will be 0.5 kva (500 va). My internet devices together needed 10 VA. So, the UPS should be able to run these devices for 50 Hours. Hmm. I sensed something was wrong about the number “50″. A UPS cannot run for that long. I didnt know why.

I found something called power factor. Most people take 0.8 to be the power factor. I presume power factor represents power losses in way of resistance and anything else along the way. With that, the UPS should run for 40 Hours. That still didnt make sense.

I asked a  few electrical engineers, computer shop owners etc. but none of them seem to know. Some of them hinted that a PC UPS needs a certain load to even work. There is supposedly an automatic trip that will kick in after a couple of minutes if no reasonable load was found. None of them told me why it had to be that way.

I found a generous internet cafe owner who gave me a 3 year old UPS to hack around with for no payment. Thanks to him. On trial and error, I did find that the UPS tripped in 2 minutes. An explanation a friend’s father gave was that a UPS is designed to provide un-interrupted power supply before you switch over to another power source (like a generator). But that still did not answer why it needs to have a certain load. A plausible explanation I came up with was that the UPS may be designed to prevent leakage of current. I also found out that there are specific UPSes designed for internet backup floating in the market and it was a tad costlier (2700 Rs) than a PC UPS.

Ok, back to the experiment, I started connecting small appliances to the UPS to provide the minimum load. First was a USB hub, then an external hard drive. Wasn’t enough. Then a CFL blub. At this point, the UPS lasted longer than 2 minutes. For 20 minutes. Considering it was a 3 year old UPS, the Storage battery inside must have outlived it’s life. A new UPS may have worked for longer, but I decided to find a proper solution if I am going to spend thousands anyway.

The next option is to find an old car battery and muck around with it. But I realised that an inverter is just that and that it is the storage battery that takes up most of the cost. Generator is another option but they make a lot of noise and are costlier. I found this excellent article which helped me decide what specifications I needed for the inverter. But unlike what is mentioned in the article, I chose a provider who gave me the entire solution rather than shop around for a UPS and battery separately. They also took care of the wiring.

Finally, I ended up shelling out 16000 Rs and am now left with significant interest in creating a commoditized renewable energy power station for a home. An energy unit that makes use of solar, water, bio waste and anything else a home may produce and creates enough energy  to minimalistically power the home back. A dream, and I hope to undertake it sometime.

I hope this helps someone out there. Ensure that you solve your power issues once and for all. As an entrepreneur, there are many other issues to get worked up about. Power shouldnt be one.