Backup Balance

Abstract

Kirk and Fred discussing how much we should invest in backup power or  systems redundancy to prepare for rare weather or use conditions.

Key Points

Join Kirk and Fred as they discuss how much money do we need to spend to have backup systems or increasing the strength or robustness of systems to insure reliabile use or availability.

Topics include:

• Engineering always has tradeoffs between costs and reliability and we know that someone will accidentally or on purpose drop a cell phone out a 12-story building window.  Should we considering making cell phones that can withstand that abuse?


• Fred lives in a beautiful wooded area in California, but the tradeoffs are that they lose power fairly often, either due to weather or the power company cutting off electrical service to prevent possible forest fires from power lines arcing. Spending money to buy and install a automatic backup generator to prepare for the occasional loss of power is much better than a catastrophic forest fire.


• The bottom line is that we cannot prepare for all rare weather or environmental conditions that cause failures, and we have to make priorities based on the impacts of a failure. Safety is of course the highest priority.

Enjoy an episode of Speaking of Reliability. Where you can join friends as they discuss reliability topics. Join us as we discuss topics ranging from design for reliability techniques to field data analysis approaches.

Show Notes

You can now purchase the recent recording of Kirk Gray’s Hobbs Engineering 8 (two 4 hour sessions) hour Webinar “Rapid and Robust Reliability Development 2022 HALT & HASS Methodologies Online Seminar” from this link.

Please click on this link to access a relatively new analysis of traditional reliability prediction methods article from the US ARMY and CALCE titled  “Reliability Prediction – Continued Reliance on a Misleading Approach”

For more information on the newest discovery testing methodology here is a link to the book “Next Generation HALT and HASS: Robust design of Electronics and Systems” written by Kirk Gray and John Paschkewitz.

Related Topic:

33 – Utilizing Multiple Layers of Protection with Fred Schenkelberg(Opens podcast in a new browser tab)

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