Northern California - Rolling Blackouts

[rik94566]

Rolling blackouts in Northern California is a real event that happens with wildfires and extreme heat events with strong winds starting this time of year.

With this comes power outages on short notice if any notice at all.

Being that Raspberry Pi's experience SD card corruption with power loss and not shut down correctly. What strategies are being used to minimize or eliminate this problem in these situations by people (besides back-up your work in a safe location)?

Is there an effective Watchdog option that people are using that will work in these situations?

[Shimbob]

A simple UPS will work wonders.

[Kiwi_Jezza]

Any basic UPS that has an output relay should do the job for you.

[rik94566]

Kiwi_Jezza & Shimbob - Thanks for the suggestions for the UPS - one of the obvious answers for sure, I failed to state that I am using a UPS as well. The problem is rolling blackouts are generally 2 to 8 hours in duration and total grid shutdowns are 2 days to 3 weeks. These time frames far exceed the UPS capabilities and hard to predict the exact shutdown time if I will be around to ensure the correct shutdown should the power shutoff occur unexpectedly. I believe now I am on track to resolve this concern and will be working to get the whole watchdog solution up and running in Home Assistant in the near term.

[ATPinMotion]

I don't understand - how does a watchdog help?

The standard solution in industry is;

UPS/Generator/PLC/transfer switch.

[Shimbob]

In the Linux world, NUT (Network UPS Tools) is the software used for managing UPS-related events. This package exists for Raspbian. If Home Assistant is based on Raspbian (I'm not familiar with HA, only Mycodo) then you can try that.

[rik94566]

Looks like this will address all the adverse events I am concerned about:

https://www.robotshop.com/en/watchdog-b ... ry-pi.html

I will keep you posted as to how it works out.