[rescue] Question of how to "smooth" power from Laser printer

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Earl Baugh <earl at baugh.org>
>Date: 2008/03/27 Thu AM 11:30:36 CDT
>To: rescue at sunhelp.org
>Subject: [rescue] Question of how to "smooth" power from Laser printer

<sniped "my desk is bigger than your desk comparison">

>ANYWAY -- The question.  In the process of moving printers I ended up moving
>my small laser onto a different power circuit and now when it first kicks on
>the draw down in power has caused some other machines to power cycle (at
>best... at worst they just trip off...as if the power browned/blacked out).

Typical - you're overloading the circuit.

>I'm going to move around some things (i.e. put the rack on the circuit that
>I pulled all the printers off... ) to resolve the problem, but even so, it's
>always "dimmed" the lights when it kicks on, so to speak..   I've got it
>hooked up to a UPS, but that doesn't seem to handle the surge if it's coming

EEEK - you don't have your laser printer on the UPS, do you?

Systems should be on UPS, not the printer - if the printer causes a brown-out, the UPS should save the systems, unless the UPS on the systems is shot (have you tested it?)...

>from the plugged in devices (handles it if the power goes low from the
>wall).   Is there any sort of device that could "augment" the power from the
>wall when this type of surge occurs?

Yes - another power circuit. I plan to run two to my "server room" - one for each rack, with 1500 - 2200 VA UPS on each for the systems, and some smaller UPS for network elements (cable, router, WAP, FTP appliance[0], etc.)

Lionel

[0] I dug up my old CompUSA "LANDISK" network drive chassis - it puts a single IDE drive on the network as an SMB and/or FTP server - I plan to use it as an anonymous FTP server for my home network, allowing me to drop stuff off/make it available with limited exposure to my other equipment. I got it several years ago at half-price (open box), before CompUSA became Tiger Direct. Link: http://fmi.compusa.com/attach/b03333de-2776-4d1d-abc6-29374c1b31fc.doc (sorry, MS-Word format)

I also started playing with my Netgear SC101 Storage Central device - it's speed isn't that bad, and once Iloaded the drivers, it appeared on my Windows Server 2003 machine as a shared network drive. I don't have matched drives inside it, but I think I will do so, and make it a RAID 1 storage device for misc files I don't want to loose, and would like to share across multiple machines easily. Link: http://netgear.com/Products/Storage/NetworkStorage/SC101.aspx