Power failures are every bit as big of a problem at work as they are at home. The best time to prepare for an outage is now, so take a look at these tips as you look over your office building’s current plans.
1. Empower Individual Staffers
Your first lines of defense against power outages should have been installed by the architects when they built your office. Emergency lights and glowing exit signs are great in places that already have them. If you don’t, then you’re probably thinking about the best ways to move around when it’s dark. Encourage staffers to keep flashlights or battery-powered lanterns in their rooms so they can still see if things suddenly go down.
Jot out any important telephone numbers so you don’t have to keep consulting cellular phones. While the towers themselves might not go down, you’ll have to ration the amount of charge carefully. Offices equipped with traditional landline service might be able to use their desk phones even if regular mains power is out.
2. Improve Your Infrastructure
Making an investment in local power grid infrastructure equipment is one of the best ways to reduce the risk of ever having an outage to begin with. Depending on who owns the poles in the immediate area, it might be best to replace them with ones that are in better shape in order to prevent weather-related issues. Simply swapping out one or two poles could mean the difference between having power and suffering from a disruption.
A majority of outages happen because of only a single point of failure. If you can install backup generators or even some sort of solar panel, then these are also a good idea since they can keep the lights on even after the power goes out. Keep some battery backup units around the office to charge phones and other devices when the mains voltage fails. These are relatively inexpensive and small enough to fit in a desk drawer, so there’s no reason that everybody can’t have their own.
3. Connect Computers to Uninterruptible Power Supplies
Every computer and other digital device should have standard UPS units between it and the wall. These are essentially full-sized versions of the battery power units used with phones and tablets. Since they offer 110-120 volts of wall power into a plug that’s the same size as the one on the wall, they should run almost any type of appliance.
System administrators usually recommend that anything with a live file system get paired up with one of these. If the power goes out, then they give users enough time to shut down without causing any problems. You won’t want to run any real mission-critical applications off of one, but they are a good way to prevent the kind of storage corruption that’s usually associated with hard shutdowns.
Some of these tips might seem a little odd to anyone who works in an office that’s never lost power. Their usefulness should become obvious the next time the lights turn out unexpectedly and everything grinds to a halt.