UofL Less the Power

I didn't keep close track of the time, but we lost power at my dorm for about 3 hours yesterday. Being a geek, I have a few stories to tell about surviving a few hours without power. However, being a geek I really wasn't without power.

When the power first went out, I immediately switched my laptop to Power Saver with the screen at the lowest brightness so that I could conserve what little power I had. However, my laptop was plugged into my small UPS so it remained plugged in even after the power went out. My desktop is plugged into my large UPS so once the power went off I turned off my desktop. It took a minute to turn off and by the time a few people started to collect in the hall way, the power was back on. I waited a few seconds, and clicked the power button on my desktop. At that exact same second the power went off and I ended up shutting down my desktop improperly and turned off my UPS so that I could use it later.

The power attempted to turn itself back on a few times in the first half hour of the outage, but it didn't have much luck. After a little while of sitting in the dark, my and Steven decided it was a good idea to plug is CFL into my UPS so that we could have power. After a little math we decided that if I have my 75 watt laptop plugged in I could plug a 15 watt bulb in.



The problem with taking pictures when it is dark is exposure time. The above picture really doesn't convey what was going on. The emergency lights in the hallway were on, but the one little CFL in our room was far brighter than anything else including the flashlights.

After a little bit of gloating at being the hold room with light (and laptops that were charging) I decided that I needed to take a picture from outside of the dorm.



I went to the lobby and there were a lot of people collecting, waiting for the power to come back on. As you can tell from the above picture, all of the dorm was without power, except for that one room at the end. It was quite a funny sight knowing that the entire campus was without power. However, we were not alone because lots of the surrounding buildings had security lights. But looking at Stevenson and Threlkeld, my room was the only one that was lit up.

Eventually, I ended up turning off the light after looking at my UPS's battery meter using my laptop. About half way through the blackout my UPS was at 25%. I think that the light would have lasted about another hour but it wasn't worth it.

I ended up attempting to finish some homework and Steven was working on finishing homework as well. He actually used my Toshiba Slice to give his laptop a boost about 2 hours in. His strategy was to use his laptop's power until it was dead and then use his UPS, but by the time his laptop was dead his UPS was at 15%. My plan was to keep my laptop charging and plugged in until the UPS died and then go to battery.

Needless to say, last night was rather eventful.