Dedicated panel
A panel exclusively for IT equipment, separate from the rest of the building, with correctly sized breakers and RCDs and labelled circuits. The floor air conditioning stops sharing a line with the servers.
Professional electrical work
Half the strange faults
Half the strange faults
are electrical
Equipment that reboots on its own, disks that corrupt, switches that hang in summer. Before replacing hardware it pays to measure the installation: panel, earthing, circuits and runtime.
What it covers
From the panel to the runtime
Measured earthing
Earth resistance measured with an earth tester and corrected if it is out of spec. Poor earthing is the silent cause of intermittent faults nobody manages to reproduce.
Separate circuits
Dedicated lines for racks, with labelled outlets and balanced phases. Someone plugging in a heater and taking down the rack stops being possible.
Correctly sized UPS
Actual load and required runtime calculated, not whatever the box claims. Includes graceful server shutdown when the battery reaches its limit, so power coming back does not find corrupted disks.
Power quality
Voltage, harmonics and micro-outages logged over several days to see what is really happening. Events that last milliseconds are not found by looking, they are found by measuring.
Documentation and drawings
A single-line diagram of the panel, identification of every circuit and a record of the measurements. What feeds what is written down, so the next intervention is not trial and error.
When it makes sense
Signs it is worth a look
- Equipment reboots on its own and nobody finds the cause
- The UPS has been asking for a battery replacement for months
- The rack shares a circuit with general-purpose outlets
- Earthing has never been measured, or there is no record of it
- After every power cut something never comes back on its own
Frequently asked
About professional electrical work
Cannot any electrician do this?
A licensed electrician does the installation, yes. The difference is the judgement: what gets separated, how much runtime is needed, how shutdown is coordinated with the servers and what gets measured to prove it was done right. We work with licensed electricians and bring that judgement.
How much UPS runtime do I need?
It depends on the goal. To shut down gracefully, ten to fifteen minutes is enough. To keep operating through the typical outages in your area, you have to measure how long those last and size accordingly, or consider a generator.
Does the power have to go off for the work?
For the panel, yes: there is an agreed outage window, normally outside business hours. Everything else, measurements included, is done with the installation running.
Measure before replacing hardware
The electrical assessment includes earth resistance measurement and power quality logging. More often than not, the fault blamed on the server was in the panel.