Subj : Y2K Toilet Paper
To   : EVERETT HERTENSTEIN
From : ROBERT MILES
Date : Tue May 23 2000 11:28 am

 -=> Quoting Everett Hertenstein to Ivy Iverson <=-

 EH> Ivy Iverson wrote in a message to Everett Hertenstein:
 
 II> Phone companies use battery banks with generator backup to
 II> supply 48-volt reserve power for their switches during power
 II> outages.  I have a pair of 6-Volt lead-acid batteries that
 II> came out of a telephone exchange that was being updated, and
 II> those suckers are nothing but HUGE!  My Ham station uses a

 EH> I haven't seen the inside of a sub-station for 50 years.  At that time
 EH> the lead acid batteries were huge rascals in glass continers.  What I
 EH> was looking at was the telephone exchange at a local university and
 EH> hospital complex.  You could look at the batterires and get some idea
 EH> of the condition of the insides.  Do they still use stuff like that?


It's been about 40 years since I've been inside a telephone exchange.
However, about 15 years ago, I worked at a company that made equipment
for telephone exchanges, and they had the same type of battery bank that
a fairly large telephone exchange would use.  It was a large rack filled
with 2-volt cells.  Each cell was in a case made of sheets of clear
plastic - perhaps plexiglas.  Each cell looked like it would hold about
10 gallons of acid, and was probably much too heavy for one person to
lift.  You could see inside those cells.

The battery banks were designed to allow all the essential equipment of
an entire telephone exchange to continue running for 72 hours during a
complete failure of the local power lines.  From what I've heard, most
telephone companies in the US still use the 72 hours with no outside
power requirement for most of their equipment.

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