Load-shedding, as we have become use to here in South Africa, is the planned shutdown of electric power in a part or parts of the power-distribution system. Generally this occurs in order to prevent the failure of the entire electrical grid when the demand strains the capacity of the system. Though the intention of load-shedding is to conserve this shared resource, there is always a negative impact on business productivity if a source of alternative power has not been provisioned.
Depending on the particular load-shedding level, power outages can last for about 2 hours (or under certain conditions, even longer) and can occur more than once per day. This means that a business will need to find at least 2 hours worth of alternative power, at least once during the day day, assuming that load-shedding will occur. Ideally, this alternative power source will be adequate to keep your desktop or laptop powered, as well as other peripheral equipment such as networking devices.
Taking into account the size of small and home offices (and the associated number of IT devices) it is easier to provision an alternative source of power for end-user computing devices, other peripheral devices and network connectivity components. Ultimately, laptops fair much better when the power goes out compared to desktops. Similarly, many entry-level network devices found in these business models use far less electricity than their counterparts in larger organisations. As such, it is possible to continue being productive in a SOHO setting, depending on the per scenario requirements.
We would like to assist you with designing your load-shedding solution and the implementation thereof. Special care should be taken to source the correct equipment as this has a bearing on the desired outcome. As such, we analyse your power requirements, align this requirment to a suitable technology, suggest appropriate solutions and then implement the chosen solution.
Larger installations, such as computer labs and SME environments have much greater requirements because of the plethora of end-user devices and other devices in the IT infrastructure. The standard way of keeping larger organizations powered is to implement a fossil fuel based electricity generation. However, since this form of alternative power is more destructive to nature, we have instead chosen to align ourseleves with renewable sources of alternative power generation. Though these alternatives are realitively 'new' and still quite expensive, they are getting cheaper as demand increases.
These larger types of projects are not our core focus but we are willing to discuss how we may be able to assist interested businesses in implementing load-shedding solutions that rely on renewable energy sources. We are happy to do an analysis of your needs and then suggest suitable options.