Thought you guys might be interested in how my HAI OPII performed during the April 27 tornado outbreak in Alabama. The area's power grid was so badly damaged that we suffered a wide-area power blackout. (Our house was not directly hit and we had only minor damage.) Here are the events recorded in my log.
We had severe storms throughout the day on April 27. Power in the region failed at 5:16 PM, and at 5:19 the OPII console annunciated AC POWER OFF TROUBLE. At 7:54 PM we got WATER ALARM ACTIVATED; the bucket that my air conditioning consendate drains into just happened to be near full when the power went off. Remaining water dripped down and filled the bucket to overflowing, and with no power, the pump couldn't run to empty it. I cleaned that up and dried off the sensor, and the water zone went back to SECURE status.
I armed the system to NIGHT at 9:43 PM and we went to bed. I was glad to have the system still operating, since I was concerned about the possibility of civil disorder (an unfounded fear, as it turned out). The system logged the time at midnight and 4:00 AM, per my programming. At 5:16 AM, it annunciated PHONE LINE DEAD TROUBLE. I checked and sure enough, our land line phones (which had been working during the evening) were dead; apparently the phone company's batteries had failed. We had no more landline phone service for the duration out the outage.
It logged the time at 8:00 AM and then annunciated BATTERY LOW TROUBLE at 8:52 AM. I went to the console to acknowledge the alarm and by this time, the console backlighting was very dim, but the controller was still operating, and the expansion box in the garage was also still operating. I disarmed the alarm at 9:12 AM. Sometime shortly after that -- I didn't note exactly when, since I wasn't watching -- the controller stopped running and the console went dark.
We were without power for the next four days. On Monday, May 2, at about 1:30 AM, the power came back on and the system came back alive. It annunciated troubles on the garage heat detectors, which are connected to the expansion box. I had turned off a bunch of breakers during the outage, so I went out to the garage and turned some of them back on. This restored power to the expansion box and the troubles cleared. Then I went back to bed.
When I got up in the morning, I retrieved the system log. I was stunned to find that the log was intact, and that all flag and user settings were intact. The depleted battery had kept the controller's memory up for nearly 90 additional hours! The system retained the time at which it had stopped executing; it logged SYSTEM RESET with a time of April 28, 10:42 AM. From that time, it took 2 hours and 10 minutes for the battery to charge enough for the battery trouble to clear. After setting the proper date and time, I calculated that, from the time of power fail Wednesday afternoon to power restore early Monday morning, it was 103 hours, 56 minutes.
After the power came back, the console keypad backlighting was very erratic; some of the LEDs were much brighter than others. It took about two weeks of continuous operation before the console backlighting looked normal again. Other than that, the system performed flawlessly.
We had severe storms throughout the day on April 27. Power in the region failed at 5:16 PM, and at 5:19 the OPII console annunciated AC POWER OFF TROUBLE. At 7:54 PM we got WATER ALARM ACTIVATED; the bucket that my air conditioning consendate drains into just happened to be near full when the power went off. Remaining water dripped down and filled the bucket to overflowing, and with no power, the pump couldn't run to empty it. I cleaned that up and dried off the sensor, and the water zone went back to SECURE status.
I armed the system to NIGHT at 9:43 PM and we went to bed. I was glad to have the system still operating, since I was concerned about the possibility of civil disorder (an unfounded fear, as it turned out). The system logged the time at midnight and 4:00 AM, per my programming. At 5:16 AM, it annunciated PHONE LINE DEAD TROUBLE. I checked and sure enough, our land line phones (which had been working during the evening) were dead; apparently the phone company's batteries had failed. We had no more landline phone service for the duration out the outage.
It logged the time at 8:00 AM and then annunciated BATTERY LOW TROUBLE at 8:52 AM. I went to the console to acknowledge the alarm and by this time, the console backlighting was very dim, but the controller was still operating, and the expansion box in the garage was also still operating. I disarmed the alarm at 9:12 AM. Sometime shortly after that -- I didn't note exactly when, since I wasn't watching -- the controller stopped running and the console went dark.
We were without power for the next four days. On Monday, May 2, at about 1:30 AM, the power came back on and the system came back alive. It annunciated troubles on the garage heat detectors, which are connected to the expansion box. I had turned off a bunch of breakers during the outage, so I went out to the garage and turned some of them back on. This restored power to the expansion box and the troubles cleared. Then I went back to bed.
When I got up in the morning, I retrieved the system log. I was stunned to find that the log was intact, and that all flag and user settings were intact. The depleted battery had kept the controller's memory up for nearly 90 additional hours! The system retained the time at which it had stopped executing; it logged SYSTEM RESET with a time of April 28, 10:42 AM. From that time, it took 2 hours and 10 minutes for the battery to charge enough for the battery trouble to clear. After setting the proper date and time, I calculated that, from the time of power fail Wednesday afternoon to power restore early Monday morning, it was 103 hours, 56 minutes.
After the power came back, the console keypad backlighting was very erratic; some of the LEDs were much brighter than others. It took about two weeks of continuous operation before the console backlighting looked normal again. Other than that, the system performed flawlessly.
