Solar Panels

[EddieM]

Same thing would apply to datacenters with beefy diesel backup UPS's

I worked somewhere once where the backup diesel generator caused the fire service to turn up.

Power cut.

Generator started up with a very loud bang and a large belch of thick black smoke, and continued to give off a lot of smokey exhaust (I think there must have been something wrong, combustion-wise).

Member of the public reported an explosion and fire.

I worked in a company once that provided real time financial data feeds to various financial companies, some genius decided to test the UPS system at 9 o'clock Monday morning... it failed, he lost his job!

 

[ban-all-sheds]

So what does a dosing pump do if it loses connection to the main pharmacy computer? Say for example if it does the old "blue screen of death"? Or the link gets hit by the old "fibre-seeking backhoe" or the building it's in gets hit by a giant sperm whale and a bowl of pertunias?

I would have thought it would carry on delivering the doses it was doing before it lost contact. IMO you'd have to be barking mad to design it so that it needed to be able to communicate with another system to be able to function properly. Fair enough for a central system to push updates to it, or to poll it for status and history, but not the other way around.

 

[ban-all-sheds]

I worked in a company once that provided real time financial data feeds to various financial companies, some genius decided to test the UPS system at 9 o'clock Monday morning... it failed, he lost his job!

I wonder why it failed.

UPSs don't need to be tested during peak times, but failover processes most definitely do.

 

[JohnW2]

It all seemed a bit far-fetched to me, but I wasn't there to question the hospital's priorities, just to get it built with as much as possible of the spend going to my company. Our profit came from the secure power supplies, what they used it for was up to them.

Sure, it's not you're fault, and no-one is criticising you - but it really does sound incredibly far-fetched. Even if what you described (remote controleld infusion pumps) does go on, I'm sure I could give you a list as long as you wanted of things in a hospital which appear to have a higher priority, as far as maintained power was concerned, than pharmacy records! The pharmacy's fridges might have been a different matter!

Kind Regards, John

 

[stillp]

you'd have to be barking mad to design

Not worked in medical electronics have you BAS? Being barking seems to be a prerequisite!

 

[ban-all-sheds]

 

[JohnW2]

I would have thought it would carry on delivering the doses it was doing before it lost contact.

Of course it would! As you say ...

IMO you'd have to be barking mad to design it so that it needed to be able to communicate with another system to be able to function properly. Fair enough for a central system to push updates to it, or to poll it for status and history, but not the other way around.

Quite - the alternative would be, as you imply, the antithesis of a 'fail safe' system. Even my TV stays on the same channel if the remote fails

Kind Regards, John

 

[EddieM]

I worked in a company once that provided real time financial data feeds to various financial companies, some genius decided to test the UPS system at 9 o'clock Monday morning... it failed, he lost his job!

I wonder why it failed.

UPSs don't need to be tested during peak times, but failover processes most definitely do.

I can't remember it's a long time ago, also before failover systems (active / passive, active / active) were in common use. IIRC our "failover" was the UPS in the same building. Anyhow, a suicidal time to test such a setup.