Lee Hutchinson
This morning, I might prefer to pour one out for a really superior piece of drugs that did all the things I requested of it with out criticism and died earlier than its time: my Unifi 8-port POE change, mannequin US-8-150W. Farewell, expensive change. You had been an actual one, and a lightning strike took you from us too quickly.
I picked up this change back in January of 2016, after I was ramping up my quest to interchange my shaky residence Wi-Fi with one thing a bit extra enterprise-y. The outcomes had been, on the entire, optimistic (you’ll be able to examine how that quest turned out in this piece right here, which accommodates a lot reflection on the implications—good and unhealthy—of going overboard on residence networking), and this little 8-port change proved to be a serious enabler of the design I settled on.
Why? Effectively, it is a good sufficient gadget—having 802.3af/at and likewise Ubiquiti’s 24-volt passive PoE possibility made it universally suitable with absolutely anything I wished to hook as much as it. However the important thing characteristic was the 2 SFP slots, which technically make this a 10-port change. I’ve a indifferent storage, and I wished to hook up some PoE-powered safety cameras on the market, together with an extra wi-fi entry level. The only answer would have been to run Ethernet between the home and the storage, however that is not really a easy answer in any respect—working Ethernet underground between two buildings will be electrically problematic until it is executed by professionals with skilled instruments, and I’m undoubtedly not an expert. A few estimates from native firms advised me that trenching conduit between my home and the storage was going to value a number of hundred {dollars}, which was greater than I wished to spend.
However optical fiber would not have any of {the electrical} points that copper does, and it really works nice between buildings. All it took to wire up my storage had been some low-cost gigabit SFP transceivers (fairly certain I used these ones right here), 40 meters of aqua-clad multimode fiber, and a $75 appointment with a contractor to really run the fiber. Then I simply needed to mount the change, and, growth, the storage was formally a part of the community.
Lee Hutchinson
The rationale why this change warrants a front-page writeup is the sheer aplomb with which it dealt with the ridiculous quantity of heat-related abuse it needed to put up with. Throughout the summer season—which in Houston lasts about 10 months out of the yr—the storage temperature can get above 120°F (round 50°C) and keep that approach for 10 or 12 hours, and the US-8-150W’s CPU thermal sensor spent most of its operational life studying between 70°–80°C. That little change ate these temperatures each single day, with out criticism, for nearly eight years.
That is fairly rattling good, in my view. Actually, the change would nonetheless be in place, fortunately doing its factor, if not for a lightning strike close to my residence a few months again. The strike brought about a bunch of issues—and a kind of issues was scrambling the change’s brains.
And even after the strike, the change nonetheless would not die. Two ports give up working altogether, and two others would not produce PoE anymore, however the US-8-150W soldiered on for one more month whereas I hunted round for a alternative.
Ultimately, the one factor I might discover to interchange the US-8-150W ended up being one other US-8-150W—and so that is what now hangs in my storage, in the identical place as its forebear. Kudos to Ubiquiti for producing this tank—no matter else the corporate might have executed, good or unhealthy, the US-8-150W was a hell of a change. Here is to it, and here is to the US-8-150W that I am changing it with. If I can get one other eight years out of this one, it’s going to completely be cash effectively spent.