>And apparently fire. I wasn’t going to chime in but one of my >providers *just* alerted us to an electrical fire in a Minneapolis pop >causing loads to failover to ups. Unknown whether weather >conditions contributed to the incident.

 

Yes, in Chicago we will see an increase in home fires because heating systems are being pushed to their limits and people tend to do stupid things like run unattended space heaters and try to thaw frozen stuff in crazy ways.  In a datacenter you might be pushing electrical loads while external electrical components are stressed with temperature.  I have seen transformer fires caused by the oil inside not circulating correctly.  You end up with hot and cold zones in them.

 

Steven Naslund

Chicago IL