Power Outage

[Grumpy Moose]

We had our first major wind storm of the season last night. My weather station recorded a gust of 70.0 mph at 10:13pm, which probably knocked out the power shortly thereafter (we are out of town right now). It looks like my UPS went offline at 11:55pm. Unfortunately, I haven't got around to configuring the UPS to auto-shutown my weather computer, so it's likely Cumulus just went down cold with the computer. I remember reading somewhere it's bad to shutdown like this, also bad to shutdown just before midnight.

Is there anything I should be looking for when I get back tonight and resstart Cumulus? Any problems or data errors I should expect or special procedures I should follow?

Thx.

http://www.alaskaweatherwatch.com/index.php

[steve]

Your first potential problem is that if Cumulus was writing to a file at the moment the power was cut, it's possible that the file might be corrupted. I think you would be unlucky for that to happen. The two files most likely to be affected are the September log file and today.ini. If they are corrupted, you might be able to recover with a text editor - open them up before you run Cumulus; any problems should be obvious. If necessary, you can retrieve the files from the latest backup; I don't think 1.9.2 had the daily backup facility, so you would be looking at the last time you started Cumulus, apart from any backups you take yourself.

Regarding the 'closing just before midnight' issue, I think you'll be OK as there will at least be the midnight entry to work with. What logger interval do you have set in the station? To be on the safe side, you could remove the last few entries in the September log file, and edit the timestamp at the start of today.ini to match the last entry remaining, so that there would be a few entries downloaded from the logger for yesterday to get Cumulus going again.

We had our first storm of the season yesterday too; peak gust 66 mph.

[Grumpy Moose]

Thanks Steve!

I openend up all of the text files when I got home and everything looked OK, so I fired up Cumulus like normal and it appears to be running just fine. All of the records and trends seem to look correct!

I definitely need to make setting up the UPS software a priority. Based on the severity of this storm so early in the season, I have a feeling this is going to be a rough winter (after the record breaking snowfall last winter)!

http://www.adn.com/2012/09/05/2612172/t ... thout.html

How often do you get severe winds at your place? We normally get them at least once a month during the winter here, though last year was pretty bad - sometimes every few days for weeks on end!

-Derek

http://alaskaweatherwatch.com/dwLinks.php

[steve]

I openend up all of the text files when I got home and everything looked OK, so I fired up Cumulus like normal and it appears to be running just fine. All of the records and trends seem to look correct!

That's good, I thought you might be OK.

How often do you get severe winds at your place? We normally get them at least once a month during the winter here, though last year was pretty bad - sometimes every few days for weeks on end!

Yes, it can be pretty much the same here. Though typically in any one winter we might expect to only get one or two really bad storms - peak gusts in the 80s mph. Looking at your data, we don't get quite as high gusts as you, my highest ever gust is 90 mph. Interestingly, that was only four days away from your high gust of 94.8 mph. Perhaps we've found a strange link in our weather!

Your average wind speeds seem quite low compared to your gusts - it tends to be quite "gusty" there?