More than 8 hours of low AC voltage killed the batteries in 2 of my rackmount UPS units. High winds caused the AC voltage in my home to wander between 40 and 80 volts RMS for over 8 hours.
The batteries were due for replacement, but this outage killed them completely. Hopefully the inverters and other parts survived. I can buy new batteries from Batteries Plus, and will do so soon.
A consequence of this outage… my gateway’s BIOS did something very odd, and decided it was going to try to boot from a different drive (which doesn’t even have a master boot record on it). It took me a while to figure it out since there are matching drives in this machine and the BIOS doesn’t give details to differentiate them. But as a result of the downtime, I decided it was time to make sure a complete restoration from my backups works. My gateway machine has a lot of software installed but not much in the way of user data. I restored everything from my backups and it worked just fine. Hooray for a real test of disaster recovery!
I also took the time to move my CVS repository off of my old web server, as well as the DHCP server. So now I can shut that machine down for good. I will run one last full backup before killing it off.