Powerchute personal energy usage corruption

[BillP]

In the attached screenshots, you can see that the energy usage screen has crazy values for time periods of one month (or more).

Is it possible to fix this?

Attachment 1:
Page 1: Tech data
Page 2: Current status (attached equipment doesn't change, is on 24 x 7 - modulo screensaver/activity changes)
Page 3: Week view (reasonable): 26 KWh/week
Page 4: Month view (crazy): 36,516 KWh/month!
Page 4: Year view (crazy): 37,044 KWh/year!

Since the load is constant, one would expect month to be roughly 4.3x week, and year to be roughly 52x week.

Further, the month value isn't physically possible: 36516/30 = 1217 kWh/day -- that's more than the total energy consumed by my house for a month.

Attachment 2: EnergyLog.mdb - I assume this has something to do with the monitoring, but since the file is password protected (Why?), it's hard to tell..

Thanks.

[BillP]

i dont know yet lol - if it starts happening, let us know and i will have to ask what else we'd need when it happens.

[BillP]

hello. i checked into this and yes, it appears that the Energylog.mdb - database is corrupt. we are not sure or why based on the info provided.

can you please stop the APC Data service and then replace the current energylog.mdb with the file i attached here and then restart the APC data service? this service can be found in the Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services.

[BillP]

Thanks. I renamed the old energylog file and replaced it with the one provided; also stopping/starting service as instructed. This seems to have reset the usage data to zero. I guess now we wait to see if it recurs.

You indicated that diagnosis of root cause was not possible with the information provided. What additional information would you like to have?

[BillP]

i did find out that the root cause appears to be that on Dec 31st the system switch from Dec 31 2011 to Dec 31 1999 and then switched back again. Also, on Dec 31 2011 we see an entry of 36400kWh used. We don't know why this happened but this is the cause of the corruption.

[BillP]

That's interesting. Something is very confused, including in your code. Time going backwards should not cause database corruption. This needs to be handled in your code - probably by dropping the entry where time goes backwards and starting a new interval. And doing the same if time jumps forward by a large amount.

But time also did not go backwards (or forwards) as far as I can tell in the system event logs. Time on this system is sync'd to time-a.nist.gov by windows. So it should always be correct. It's interesting that your analysis correlates the failure correlates with the end of the year.

I can't be sure (the system event log overflowed due to a graphics driver), but I think the machine was rebooted at ~05:58 on 31-dec-11. It's only a couple of years old, so it's not a Y2K issue. It is (and was) up-to-date with M$ updates.

[BillP]

can you provide a screenshot of what issue you saw/see? i had someone review your database file but we did not see anything in there like the original poster. that way we can see if it is the same or different issue.

[Anonymous user]

I am seeing what I believe to be the same issue.

If what you are saying is true, this is a software issue. Can we expect a powerchute 3.X with a fix for this anytime soon?

Message was edited by: tsuckow

[mlsomers_apc]

I'm really glad that these figures are not what's truly being consumed 🙂 (see the screenshot)

Where can I find the mdb file?

Here are my model's details:
Model: Back-UPS RS 550GI
Firmware revision: 857.L3.I
Software version: PowerChute Personal Edition 3.0.0.1
Date of last manual self-test: 3-2-2012
Result of last manual self-test: Passed

[BillP · Accepted solution]

i think it is in the program directory - like C:\Program Files\APC\PowerChute Personal Edition and some place in there? I don't have it installed to double check 😞