Lee Hutchinson
This morning, I would wish to pour one out for a really superior piece of drugs that did every part I requested of it with out grievance and died earlier than its time: my Unifi 8-port POE change, mannequin US-8-150W. Farewell, pricey change. You have been an actual one, and a lightning strike took you from us too quickly.
I picked up this change again in January of 2016, once I was ramping up my quest to exchange my shaky house Wi-Fi with one thing just a little extra enterprise-y. The outcomes have been, on the entire, optimistic (you possibly can examine how that quest turned out in this piece proper right here, which accommodates a lot reflection on the results—good and dangerous—of going overboard on house networking), and this little 8-port change proved to be a significant enabler of the design I settled on.
Why? Nicely, it is a good sufficient system—having 802.3af/at and in addition Ubiquiti’s 24-volt passive PoE possibility made it universally appropriate 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 best resolution would have been to run Ethernet between the home and the storage, however that is not truly a easy resolution in any respect—operating Ethernet underground between two buildings may be electrically problematic except it is carried out by professionals with skilled instruments, and I’m positively 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 does 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 have been some low-cost gigabit SFP transceivers (fairly certain I used these ones proper right here
Lee Hutchinson
The explanation 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 time—which in Houston lasts about 10 months out of the 12 months—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 grievance, for nearly eight years.
That is fairly rattling good, for my part. In truth, the change would nonetheless be in place, fortunately doing its factor, if not for a lightning strike close to my house a few months again. The strike prompted a bunch of issues—and a type of issues was scrambling the change’s brains.
And even after the strike, the change nonetheless would not die. Two ports stop 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.
In the long run, the one factor I may discover to exchange 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 carried out, good or dangerous, the US-8-150W was a hell of a change. Here is to it, and this 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 will completely be cash effectively spent.
