Lee Hutchinson
This morning I’d like to give one to a truly amazing piece of equipment that did everything I asked of it without complaint and died a while ago: my Unifi 8-port POE switch, model US-8-150W. Goodbye, dear switch. You were real and a lightning strike took you from us too soon.
I picked up this switch in January 2016 as I stepped up my quest to replace my dodgy home Wi-Fi with something a little more corporate. The results were generally positive (you can read about how that quest turned out in this article right here, which contains many reflections on the consequences – good and bad – of overdoing the home network), and this little 8-port switch turned out to be a major enabler the design I decided on.
Why? Well, it’s a pretty nice device – thanks to 802.3af/at as well as Ubiquiti’s 24V passive PoE variant, it was universally compatible with almost anything I wanted to connect to it. But the key feature was the two SFP slots, which technically make it a 10-port switch. I have a detached garage and wanted to hook up some PoE powered security cameras there along with another wireless access point. The simplest solution would be to run Ethernet between the house and the garage, but that’s not really a simple solution at all – running Ethernet underground between two buildings can be electrically problematic unless it’s done by professionals with professional tools, and I’m certainly not a professional. Several estimates from local companies told me that the trench pipe between my house and garage would cost several hundred dollars, which was more than I wanted to spend.
But fiber optic has none of the electrical problems that copper does and works great between buildings. All it took to wire up my garage was some cheap gigabit SFP transceivers (I’ve certainly used these right here), 40 meters water-coated multimode fiberand a $75 meeting with the supplier who actually runs the thread. Then I just had to install the switch and boom, the garage was officially part of the network.
Lee Hutchinson
The reason this Switch deserves a front page write-up is the sheer confidence with which it handled the ridiculous amount of heat-related abuse it had to deal with. During the summer—which is about 10 months of the year in Houston—the garage temperature can get above 120°F (around 50°C) and stay that way for 10 or 12 hours, and the CPU temperature of the US-8-150W sensor has spent most of its operational life reading between 70°–80°C. That little switch ate those temps every day, no complaints almost eight years.
I think that’s pretty damn good. In fact, the switch would still be in place and happily doing its thing if not for a lightning strike near my home a few months ago. The strike caused a lot of problems – and one of those problems was confusing switcher brains.
And even after the strike, the switch he still wouldn’t die. Two ports stopped working completely and two others no longer produced PoE, but the US-8-150W worked for another month while I looked for a replacement.
In the end, the only thing I could find to replace the US-8-150W was another US-8-150W – and that’s what’s hanging in my garage now, in the same place as its predecessor. Kudos to Ubiquiti for making this tank – whatever else the company has done, good or bad, the US-8-150W has been one hell of a switch. Here it is and here is the US-8-150W I am replacing it with. If I can get another eight years out of it, it will absolutely be money well spent.
