North American Network Operators Group
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Re: 365 Main reason for outage report published

  • From: Deepak Jain
  • Date: Fri Aug 03 15:02:41 2007 

Register4Less recently reported a power failure in Montreal where the
return of a single cycle from the utility tricked generators into
shutting down all three cycles, throwing the data center onto UPS until
the batteries died.  They did not report make of generator or of the
board that failed them.

Many generator control systems (and transfer switches) do not monitor all three phases for voltage, and stability (phase sync). Any of these can cause a UPS to use its batteries (without charging) and not fire up the generator. Or conversely, allow a generator to power down.

Its happened to lots of people in various places, but I am not going to name-names.

DJ