One of the problems with being decrepit is that I have had to hand over house maintenance to my 'Sorcerer's Apprentice' son. I used isolate just what I was working on, but that was me. He prefers to switch the whole house off, thus freaking my computers (a X86_64 box and a RazPi 4).

The first time, he blew a fast acting 10 Amp plug fuse on my x86_64 box. Yesterday, the Razpi wouldn't start X and e2fsck found errors on it's SSD. It transpired a lib was missing from the package 'at-spi2-atk-2.38.0-aarch64-3', and it's package was missing, so when I reinstalled 'at*,' it still wasn't there. That's ridiculous and impossible, but when you've seen as much ridiculous & impossible stuff happen as I have, You just shrug & carry on.

How can I protect against future dirty switch-offs? I'm in city suburbs, pretty free of lightning strikes, & heavy industrial/inductive loads. But we are threatened with cut-offs this winter - as well as my son's efforts.

I have an APC UPS and using apcupsd it will automatically shutdown the computer but there is also nut which which supports many other models. Since it is a network tool it has the capability to shutdown other devices plugged into the UPS so the Pi is also covered.

So it's a UPS I need? I don't think I'll bother. I was hoping for some filter dodge, but I'm trying to compensate for bad power supply design. I'm very disappointed in the PC's power supply in particular. As a techie, you become finely tuned as to how much energy is needed to take out fuses of a certain rating.

Why switching off (or on) the power is such a big deal is what I can't figure. I've basically no inductive or capacitative loads here except low current switch mode supplies, and a few bulbs. When the mains goes off, everything survives. But when just my house goes off, things are strained.

So I'll keep grumbling and repairing here, and mark this solved.

Do you have a surge protector?

Not really. What do you have in mind? All switch mode PSUs have a surge protector inbuilt to protect the psu from incoming spikes and the mains supply from outgoing noise. Any spike is getting through the regulated switch mode supplies on to low voltage and affecting disks.

I'm very well up on surge types, levels, & designs to cope, an switchmode supplies should ride out surges pretty well. I fail to see a failure mode, but I have the dead body of a 10 Amp fuse saying there is one. The PC has a 600W supply, which should remain under 5 amps current at all times.

We in Europe also have CE regulations, which among other things, requires all metal parts to be earthed. So the metal case on my PC & RazPi is earthed. The earth in this house is checked and good. The PC has a mains earth lead, the RazPi is earthed via the 0V line of the 5.1V supply. There's a minimal potential between earth & neutral, under 2V always, and usually under 1V.

Hi,

I now live in Florida and it is consider to be the lightning capital. I use a whole house surge protection along with UPS for my electronics. No real issue here except the age of the UPS batteries which can be replaced.

I've not experienced any major issues except storm outages but a whole house gen-set is out of the question here in our community because of HOA rules. I own my property but restrictions do prevent me freedom to modify things like I'm used to like when I was on my farm. Modern society rules suck but in place for a reason.

Good luck with you power issues!

EDIT: I am considering a battery whole house system as first stage to solar.

Just keep a live gparted disc or usb drive to do file system checks on your pi sd cards and such.

I have my Pi on a completely different place than my PC.

I'm just annoyed. I had my workshop in the attic. I used to spend some hours here most days soldering stuff. I'd trip the RCD with the (earthed) tip of a soldering iron, which would cut out the house. Nothing ever complained, or blew. I bought a three phase circuit breaker when I got fed up, and used it to break live, earth, & neutral so I could solder in peace.

Now a few years later, and the same house in the same place is freaking stuff when my son tweaks the power once or twice. I just don't get it.

@rokytnji: I have a usb SSD for normal use, and an sdcard for the 'save-my-ass' situation. Like floppy drives of old, the sdcard has boot priority, so I can sort things with that. Once I have runlevel 3 running, it's infinitely easier for me to sort it over ssh. What freaked me and started this was to lose a library from X and it's package from /var/log/packages as well. You'd swear I never installed it.

Be thankful you have HOA rules. I used to live where there were none to prohibit Generacs. Living next door to one in a neighborhood with frequent power outages is a unique kind of hell. If you stay inside, the UPSes beep you crazy until the batteries go dead. If you open windows or go outside, it sounds like a neighbor is automatically running his dyno continuously until the power comes back on - never any peace when there should be nothing to hear but insects or birds.