If you’ve checked the forecast, you already know this week is brutal — highs near 100°F across the city and Tri-State area through Thursday and Friday, with the heat index pushing 110. This is shaping up to be the most significant heat wave the area has seen in over a decade, and utilities like Con Edison and PSEG Long Island are already asking customers to conserve energy as the grid strains under demand.

For most people, that means cranking the AC and staying hydrated. But if you run a business, extreme heat creates another risk: it’s hard on the equipment that keeps you running. Email, phones, point of sale, file servers, security cameras — all of it depends on hardware that doesn’t handle heat well, and on a power grid that’s under more stress than usual.

Here’s what to watch for and what you can do about it before Thursday’s peak.

Power Outages

When everyone runs their AC at full blast at the same time, the power grid gets strained. This can lead to a few different things, and it’s worth knowing the difference:

• Full outages — the power just goes out. Obvious, but the most disruptive.
• Brownouts — the utility intentionally reduces voltage to ease demand on the grid. Your lights might dim slightly and you may not even notice, but it’s still “dirty” power that can be hard on sensitive electronics.
• Power surges and sags — when power comes back on after an outage, or when the grid is straining, voltage can spike or dip unpredictably for a moment. These quick fluctuations are often what actually damages equipment, more so than the outage itself.

The bottom line: even if your power never fully goes out, a stressed grid during a heat wave like this one can quietly degrade or damage equipment over time, especially anything without surge protection.

Your IT Closet

Here’s the part most businesses don’t think about (we do though): that closet (or corner, or cabinet) where your network switch, router, and maybe a server live is usually one of the least-ventilated spaces in the building. It’s often windowless, sometimes doubles as storage, and rarely has its own cooling.

That’s a problem because computer equipment generates its own heat just by running — and during a heat wave, that heat has nowhere to go. A few reasons this matters more than you may think:

• Electronics are rated for a temperature range, typically somewhere around 50–95°F for most commercial gear. Once you’re consistently above that, you’re operating equipment outside of its design spec.
• Heat accelerates hardware failure. As a rough rule of thumb common in the IT industry, every 18°F (10°C) above the recommended operating temperature can cut the expected lifespan of electronic components roughly in half. A switch or server that should last 5-7 years might only give you 2-3 if it’s regularly cooking in a hot closet.
• Heat causes performance problems before it causes outright failure. Servers and network gear will often throttle themselves down, behave erratically, or randomly reboot when they overheat — which can look like a mysterious software problem when it’s actually a heat problem.
• It’s cumulative. A few hot days probably won’t kill anything. Repeated heat stress over a season, especially combined with humidity, is what really shortens equipment life.

What to do: if you have a dedicated AC unit or vent serving your server closet, make sure it’s actually running and not blocked by boxes or furniture. If you don’t have dedicated cooling in that space, even a simple solution — propping the door open with a fan circulating air during business hours, or a portable AC unit — can make a real difference during a stretch like this. For a longer term solution, talk to your IT about what is involved and needed to get proper ventilation and cooling in your IT closet.

Battery Backup

A UPS (uninterruptible power supply) is the single most cost-effective piece of insurance you can have for a week like this. It does two jobs:

1. Bridges short outages so your equipment doesn’t just drop dead when the power blinks, giving you time to shut things down cleanly or just ride out a brief blip.
2. Conditions the power going to your equipment, smoothing out the surges and sags mentioned above — which protects your gear even on days when the power never fully goes out.

If you don’t already have battery backup on your critical equipment — servers, network switches, point of sale systems — this week is the week to prioritize it. And if you do have UPS units, it’s worth doing two quick checks:

• Battery health. UPS batteries degrade over time and typically need replacement every 3-5 years. A UPS with a dead battery gives you a false sense of security.
• Load. Make sure the UPS isn’t overloaded with more equipment than it’s rated to support during an outage — that shortens your runtime right when you need it most.

Keep an Eye on Things

You can’t watch your IT closet 24/7, which is exactly why monitoring matters. At a minimum, you want something that will alert you (or your IT provider) if:

• A server or network device goes offline
• Power is lost or a UPS switches to battery
• Temperature in a server closet climbs above a safe threshold (if you have temperature monitoring in place)

The value of monitoring during a heat wave isn’t just knowing when something breaks — it’s catching the warning signs before it does, like a UPS that’s been running on battery for an unusual amount of time, or a closet that’s slowly crept up in temperature over a few days.

Remote Workers and Share Spaces

Remote work is still very prevalent and your critical workers are subject to local power outages and issues as well. They may not have an IT closet to worry about, but if they are on the grid, they are subject to brownouts and shortages just like an office building is. Internet access is more critical for these workers since they most likely rely on a constant connection to do their work. You should consider outfitting these workers with a UPS to protect their equipment like routers, firewalls, switches, laptops, desktops, etc. whether they own it or the company does. If they can’t be productive, it’s still a risk to you.

If you or your team uses share space, you are somewhat at the mercy of the company hosting your office space. It might be worth it to check in with their IT to see what plans they are making and what they have in place to keep network connectivity up and to be available in the case of heat related events. Outfitting those workers with a UPS should be considered as well since you have no control over the power circuits in the share space.

A Few Other Things Worth Thinking About

• Backups. This is always true, but worth repeating during a high-risk week: make sure your backups actually ran recently and that you could restore from them if a piece of hardware died unexpectedly.
• Surge protection on everything, not just your server closet — workstations, POS terminals, and anything else plugged into the wall that you’d be upset to replace.
• A plan for what happens during an actual outage. Do your employees know what to shut down cleanly versus what’s protected by battery backup? Even a short, simple checklist helps avoid panic and avoid damage from improper shutdowns.
• Check your physical space, not just your equipment. Heat-stressed buildings sometimes have other issues pop up during heat waves too — failing HVAC systems, humidity affecting paper records or older hardware, etc.

The Takeaway

None of this requires a major investment to get ahead of — most of it is a matter of checking what you already have (Is the closet cooled? Does the UPS battery still hold a charge? Are we getting alerts?) and fixing the gaps before Thursday’s peak heat hits. A little bit of attention this week can be the difference between a business that doesn’t notice the heat wave at all, and one dealing with a fried server.

If you’re not sure where your setup stands, we’re happy to help take a look and discuss your options. Stay cool!