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That UPS you bought for your home server may not be as useful as you think

• colechristensen 6y ago
  TL;DR some UPS systems will shut down power when they detect battery failure even when mains electricity is working.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    UPSs, in my experience, quite often have or develop faults that defeat their purpose. We just threw one out that would cut power entirely during self-test, but only during self-test, not during an actual outage. I've seen their battery monitoring circuits fail such that they report a battery as good until power is cut and then die immediately. The other way also happens, reporting all batteries as bad even though they might be brand new, so you're never sure when to replace them. I've come to the conclusion that if you are going to use a UPS, your equipment should always be plugged in to at least 2 UPSs, either via redundant power supplies or an ATS PDU.
• kop316 6y ago
  > I live in a place where blackouts are very infrequent (perhaps a couple per year), but occasionally the mains drops out for only a second or two. I suspect these very short dropouts occur when substation switchgear operates, but have no way of being sure. Anyway, with a server running 24/7 I obviously wanted protection against any loss of the mains supply. > So I thought I had covered all bases, and, indeed, the UPS proved useful on several occasions. I would quite often be on a work trip and receive an e-mail from the server informing me that mains power to the UPS had been lost, then another e-mail soon after informing me that mains power to the UPS had returned. Only once did the power cut last longer than the battery capacity, and the server was shutdown automatically. It sounds like the UPS is doing exactly what he wants it to do. This is exactly why I bought a UPS. I would have power transients sometimes and rebooting my entire network (with NAS and servers) was annoying, and I didn't want it to go out when I was gone. His main complaint is he bought a standby UPS where the battery failed, it turned off the UPS (which is understandably frustrating), and now replaces the battery every three years. Looking at the white paper referenced, it even says to go for Line Interactive for servers. I'm also curious how the person knew that power wasn't cut when he was away? So other than buying the wrong type of UPS (which at face value looks to be a valid complain based on research)....why isn't a UPS as useful as they'd think?
  • xxpor 6y ago
    >a standby UPS where the battery failed, it turned off the UPS I assume this would be because the power is always flowing through the battery/inverter? Wouldn't that kill the battery a lot faster? Although it'd make the switch from mains to actual battery power basically a non-event from the output's perspective. Now that I think about it, going 120/240->low voltage dc->120/240->12/5/3.3 is incredibly silly. IIRC there are 48 (or -48?) DC power supplies out there, mostly for data center use. Does anyone make an ATX version that you could hook up to a UPS that has a DC output?
    • snuxoll 6y ago
      Standby UPS topologies like the APC Back-UPS lines keep the battery out of the loop until a loss of power from the AC input is detected, at which point the inverter kicks on the the transfer switch takes the feed from there. This is a design choice from APC, money is on the control electronics being powered off the battery meaning a dead or missing battery means the entire unit is non-functional. Making the unit resilient to this probably costs as much as a line-interactive unit, however, so you might as well just tell people to get a better unit than make a middle-ground solution.
      • formerly_proven 6y ago
        I have a line-interactive APC and it most definitely is just a UPS-shaped brick without a battery. Might have changed in newer models, I wouldn't know.
        • zaarn 6y ago
          My APC BackUPS Pro (supposedly line interactive) runs fine without battery (ran it with a tab from shipping still in the case), might depend on the setup. Generally line interactive makes little sense why it wouldn't work without battery since the power rail is shared.
    • jcrawfordor 6y ago
      Using a DC auxiliary power supply for backup is common in telecommunications equipment and by extension common in network appliances - "redundant power supply" for network equipment typically means a built-in AC power supply and then DC connections for an external aux power supply that provides battery, often called an RPS. This isn't common for servers though which, if equipped for redundant power, have two AC power supplies. I think this just comes down to the higher current draw usually associated with servers, running even 48VDC power can become costly and impractical when you need to supply say a couple thousand watts per rack, so the extra space and thermal load of an AC power supply in each unit becomes preferable. The downside is that while redundant power supply is usually a "standard" feature on switches and routers (that is, they always have the connection whether or not you buy an RPS is up to you), you need to specify and pay extra for dual AC power supplies up-front in servers, so you don't get as smooth as an upgrade path. That said in datacenter environments you often buy servers, racks, and power systems all at once so it's not as much of a concern. There's a similar tradeoff that exists around bottom-of-rack UPS and central (building or area) UPS---bottom-of-rack UPS tends to be more expensive, higher maintenance, higher thermal load, etc for large installations, so usually large installations use one (or two for A+B power) large central units which may be hybrid between different technologies like flywheel and battery (and you could view the transfer to generators as a "third stage" of a central UPS system), but it also makes your cabling a little more complicated and you have a bit of an "eggs in one basket" situation. Central UPS generally have internal redundancy so their risk of failure is low, and often a bypass device where if a non-recoverable failure of the UPS is detected a contactor "shunts" the entire UPS removing it from the circuit so you don't lose power due to a UPS failure, but that doesn't necessarily save you when the HVAC pours water directly into the UPS control cabinet causing widespread failure of the control electronics... a situation that I have somehow seen twice. I bet on bigger installs you can get an external bypass with some sort of health monitoring though? If HP/Tandem taught is one thing it's that you can always through more redundancy into your very special basket.
• Havoc 6y ago
  Generally line interactive is less preferable since they provide less protection from surges than a double conversion setup. Big price difference though so line interactive is usually a reasonable compromise.
  • snuxoll 6y ago
    For a home setup you aren’t going to be spending the money a double or delta conversion unit costs, so line-interactive is the only sane choice. You really don’t want line-interactive gear when dealing with larger loads either, as the transformer will just cause extra current draw during a voltage sag. This is why you don’t see (many of) them above 3-5KVA.
• samcheng 6y ago
  With all of the recent advances in Lithium-type battery tech (e.g. 18650) it seems like a market opportunity to create a new, modern, small, smart UPS. These low-end APC dinosaurs still use lead acid, and in my experience (with a solid utility over the past decade) outages are just as likely to be caused by battery failure than some kind of actual power outage. If anyone wants to build something better, happy to chat further.
  • floatrock 6y ago
    Main advantage of lithium-ion over lead acid is lithium-ion is more energy dense so you can have a smaller size at a smaller weight. Important if you're building cars, but the price premium probably isn't worth it if you're building another office box at commodity pricing. Edit: Since we're armchair-building for a predictable, high-uptime application, failure modes might have an interesting advantage though. Any battery engineers know if lithium ion has more predictable or measurable failure modes? Yes, we've all seen the exploding hoverboards... I'm assuming theoretically well-built electronics.
    • martinflack 6y ago
      It could possibly target the "Apple-esque" product category by using a smaller physical footprint to emphasize sleek looks, perhaps with a small sharp readout. The small size could be leveraged further by only attempting to provide power for a short amount of time, say 10 minutes, emphasizing and requiring USB connectivity to shutdown the protected computer at minute 9.
    • thescriptkiddie 6y ago
      Lithium batteries have a much longer lifespan than lead acid, which would eliminate the need to replace UPS batteries every few years. They are also more power dense, so if the goal is just to keep a machine running long enough for a clean shutdown, you can get away with a smaller (energy and size) battery for the same load.
  • jimktrains2 6y ago
    I thought the main advantage of lead acid or gel cell vs li-ion is cost, recharge cycle, and the ability to provide high amperage.
• WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
  If a power outage is long enough for the battery to go flat, I need to power on things gradually, or my UPS will act as if overloaded. The stuff I've plugged in barely amounts to 280W. It's a home lab, so no much harm done, but also, so much for unattended recovery from failure. It's good for brief outages caused by thunderstorms, though, so still better than nothing.
• lini 6y ago
  The explanation of the failure was very strange to me. I know there are three main UPS types - offline, line interactive, and online. Offline types have the battery disconnected until there is a power outage and only use it when needed. Line interactive and online use the battery more often to absorb power spikes, brownouts, and other anomalies. These two types also use the battery more and need replacements more often than offline UPS. I have been using the same offline UPS and battery for the last 7 years and it is still working fine - a few days ago it handled a 15 min power outage with 50% of the battery. Can someone explain why offline UPS can fail if the battery dies? Is it by design or a manufacturer specific issue (e.g. only APC brand ones do this)?
  • kop316 6y ago
    Re-reading I was thinking the same thing. Batteries don't just "die", they degrade in performance. How did he also know power didn't go out too? That confused me as well.
    • monoideism 6y ago
      Probably he knew because none of his other electrical appliances were reset.
    • danilocesar 6y ago
      because he gets emails from the unit when it happens. I had a script in a raspberry pooling my UPS each minute asking if the unit was running on AC or battery, and dropping that info into a file when it changed. I know the software/daemon can also do something like that.
      • jaywalk 6y ago
        Yes, but in this case he wouldn't have gotten an email since the UPS failed right when the power went out. I actually had the exact same thing happen to me a few months ago. A power flicker so brief that it didn't even reset any of my clocks, but it caused one of my cheapo standby UPSes to give out.
  • 6y ago
• popotamonga 6y ago
  Worst part about UPS that i didn't know was: The constant humming (no fan, just electrical) so cant sleep in same room The loud can't turn it off beeps when power is out. And none of those come in the product description.
  • wtracy 6y ago
    You can silence the alarm by pulling the battery connection. Obviously, that's inconvenient if you want the UPS to be useful again as soon as the power comes back. I personally like the white noise from electronics, so I can't help you there.
  • SyneRyder 6y ago
    There is a way to turn off the beeps on the APC UPS line (at least the ES 700 I have), but it involves installing software that comes with it onto a Windows machine, connecting to the UPS via USB and changing the settings. It's enough of a pain to do that rather than configure all 3 UPS devices in my house, I've only ever gotten around to doing it on one. Can't say I've noticed the electrical hum, except during a blackout. But I don't have mine in a bedroom.
    • _rs 6y ago
      Newer models have a button you can press and hold to toggle the alarms without plugging into a computer.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  • robbyt 6y ago
    The hum is caused by cheap or warn lamination on the transformer. I recently "fixed" an older APC by opening it, removing the large transformer, coating the fins in nail polish, and adding rubber washers to the mounting screws.
  • jlgaddis 6y ago
    > The loud can't turn it off beeps when power is out. That depends on the UPS, it seems. I have a pair of Back-UPS 1500s with the external battery packs. They have a button on the front-panel for disabling/enabling the audible alarm (just hold it down for 2s, IIRC).
• iagovar 6y ago
  If you want a poors man home server just repurpose old laptops. I do with a bunch of them and it's fine. I know laptops are not for that, but they wouldn't have any other use anyway, and it's like a server with an UPS built in. Most tasks are running scrapers or data wrangling so I don't have to keep my desktop running. I've been doing this for maybe close to two years, and for now it works. I wouldn't recommend for VMs though. Also, your router needs an UPS too but it will be fine with a cheap one.
  • vladvasiliu 6y ago
    > I wouldn't recommend for VMs though. Why not? I have a laptop with a 4th gen i5 that has VT-x. I've upgraded it to 16 GB RAM and an SSD. For now, it's a Spotify connect player but I'm contemplating running a couple VMs on it too, like pi-hole and whatnot.
    • iagovar 6y ago
      Well, but that's not that old. If you have that lying around then definitely.
      • oarsinsync 6y ago
        4th gen is 2013-2014, so up to 6-7 years old. Sure, that’s still reasonable, but it’s not young. I’m also using similar class hardware for my VM server at home. Works well enough for home workloads, and for everything else there’s the cloud on demand.
        • iagovar 6y ago
          I have an thinkpad x220 with some core-duo on it and 4GB Ram, can't remember, and it really was struggling with VMs. Didn't really cared much to check the specs. Just tried some debian VMs and it was less than satisfying.
  • drcongo 6y ago
    I've been running a 2008 MacBook Pro as a server for 10 years. I've replaced the battery once, about 2 years ago, and one of the fans about six months ago. Other than that, it's been on the whole time.
• lsllc 6y ago
  Like the author, I rarely see power interruptions that last more than a second or two (unless there's a major snowstorm or something). It's kind of annoying and I'd love to see a solution that isn't just "get a battery based UPS" -- maybe something capacitor based, enough for say 15-30 seconds? I guess I could get a flywheel [0], but I don't think it'd fit in my basement. [0] https://www.vertiv.com/en-us/products/brands/liebert/?id=59 https://www.vertiv.com/en-us/products/brands/liebert/?id=59
  • pacaro 6y ago
    Back in the late 90s I had a PC motherboard that had a capacitor for exactly this. I could (if i was quick) change which outlet the pc was plugged into without loss of uptime
    • zantana 6y ago
      I also remember a green pc set up which used one of the low power x86 clones (Via?) in the 90s which used the bios battery double as a mini ups similar to that.
  • mprovost 6y ago
    At the reasonably sized datacentre that I ran we had a voltage conditioner that also had "sag protection". It was an HPC shop and we decided that it wasn't worth the money to put the compute on UPS (just storage and core servers but the Top 500 machines ran off mains) but we still had 10s of millions of dollars worth of hardware that a lightning strike etc could fry. The conditioner provided a constant voltage to the servers and could correct "sags" where the voltage would drop, and it could keep things going for a few seconds if the power went off completely. As you say this took our total outages down from probably 10 a year to maybe 1 or 2 - most outages are quite short. Although looking at the graphs on this thing, there were pretty frequent surges and sags coming from the street, like when you see light bulbs flicker in your house. One other thing we noticed was that if there was a short interruption, all of the HP servers could survive for a second but the Dells turned off right away. Different power supplies store up some amount of power locally. https://new.abb.com/ups/power-and-voltage-conditioners/voltage-conditioners/pcs100-avc-40 https://new.abb.com/ups/power-and-voltage-conditioners/volta...
• ramshanker 6y ago
  One thing I always wonder about these home server is this. When you are leaving house for a long vacation, is it really safe to leave some electrical appliances working? Aren’t people afraid of fire hazard. What if there is a short circuit while you are away. A smelling short circuit would definitely burn something if left unattended for few days. For once there was a high voltage fault in my neighbourhood, destroying few lights, all mobile chargers plugged in and microwave left in standby. Had I not been home, and fault lasting more than 5min, things might have gone really bad. Now on, Whenever I leave my home for long duration, I just empty the Refrigerator and switch the house mains supply off before loving the house.
  • Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    Isn't a short circuit going to just blow the relevant fuses? Also most UPSes should protect from surges as well as power outages.
  • stingraycharles 6y ago
    I can answer this as I’m currently on a two-week holiday and I have a small homelab running at home. First and foremost: fire alarms. Buy them, and use plenty of them. Secondly: let your neighbors know you’re on vacation. This implies a certain amount of trust with your neighbors, but it’s good to be on good terms with them for more reasons than just this. Thirdly: I get notifications if a server goes down or a fire alarm is triggered. With all this in place, I don’t worry at all. I may be somewhat ignorant or oblivious to certain risks, but in general I trust the safety net I just described.
  • amluto 6y ago
    I find it surprising that service panels don’t have more extensive protection features. I would like my main breaker to trip under any of these conditions: - Sustained overvoltage. Any overvoltage lasting too long to be handled by a surge protector should trip the main breaker. - Sustained undervoltage. Some devices don’t like this. - Phase error. A two phase main should detect incorrect phase-to-neutral voltages and incorrect phase-to-phase voltages. A three phase main should also detect incorrect phase sequence. This should also catch some cases of a disconnected neutral. - Excessive neutral to ground current. In the US, for reasons I personally strongly dislike, every “service” has a connection from ground to neutral, usually in the meter box or the main panel. Various errors can cause substantial current to flow through this connection and can be dangerous. For example, if a house and the utility both have excellent grounds but the house’s neutral feed breaks, all the voltages can be close to correct and the house’s neutral current will return to the utility through ground. This is dangerous and will not be detected by common equipment. (A whole-house residual current detector would satisfy this, too. I think these are used in Europe.)
• yardie 6y ago
  For those unaware of what the different lines do: Here is how I differentiate the APC brand: * Back-UPS: inverter offline, expect a 15-20ms power transfer * Smart-UPS: interactive, inverter is always online 2-5ms trasnfter * Symmetra and above: inverter online, voltage conditioned, 0ms transfer Most desktops will work just fine with the Back-UPS line. The processor is practically sleeping. Workstations should be on a Smart-UPS because the PSU capacitor won't have the capacity for a brownout with a Xeon-class CPU and multiple GPUs.
  • croutonwagon 6y ago
    Not always. I have these. https://www.apc.com/shop/us/en/products/Power-Saving-Back-UPS-XS-1300/P-BX1300G# https://www.apc.com/shop/us/en/products/Power-Saving-Back-UP... They are line-interactive. Most of their "tower" UPS models seem to be Line Interactive. Its those little ones that look like oversized surge protectors that usually are offline.
    • yardie 6y ago
      I have the next step up from this, the 1500 VA. I assumed the UPS under my desk was the Smart-UPS series but I can see it is the Back-UPS Pro. I haven't been in the office in months!
  • jaxx75 6y ago
    I had 3 hard drives (likely) fail because of brownouts regularly occurring at a residence when high-amperage devices kicked on (power tools, air con, hairdryers, etc). The line would drop into the 80-90v range (120vac) which wasn't enough to turn anything off, but you could notice the lights "flicker." After a voltage conditioning UPS was added, haven't had a hdd failure
    • jcrawfordor 6y ago
      For situations where a UPS is too expensive or impractical you can also buy pure voltage regulators that use some kind of autotransformer, like the APC Line-R. I worked for an institution for a while that had every laser printer on one, there had been some bad experiences with losing laser printers to overvoltage incidents but they generally draw too much current to go on a UPS. I've also seen them used for A/V equipment.
• dragontamer 6y ago
  > While I was away from home on a long work trip, suddenly I could no longer connect to my server and I had not received an e-mail from the server informing me of any problem. Luckily it was near the end of my trip so I was not too inconvenienced. When I arrived home I found that the UPS was sounding an alarm and was not supplying power to the server even though there was mains supply to the UPS. It transpired that the UPS battery had suddenly died without warning and could no longer hold a charge, and this had happened while there was mains supply to the UPS, i.e. there had not been a power cut while I was away. Fortunately there was no loss of data on the server; I was able to run fsck during boot-up. And this is why professional servers have two, redundant, power supplies. If you had two power supplies, the UPS would fail, but you'd continue to function off of mains voltage. UPS can fail. Mains can fail. Two power supplies hooked up two both powering your server redundantly means you'll only fail if both fail simultaneously.
  • mprovost 6y ago
    That doesn't protect against surges though - any weirdness from the mains power would still fry your server through the unprotected power supply.
    • dragontamer 6y ago
      Surge protectors are pretty cheap, and I generally assume that all expensive equipment would use them when connecting to mains.
      • adrianmonk 6y ago
        Also, surge protectors wear out and should be replaced before they lose the ability to protect. This will probably occur at a different time than when the UPS wears out, so it could be beneficial to keep them separate so you can replace the surge protector only.
    • marcosdumay 6y ago
      You don't need an UPS to protect against surges. In fact, UPSs aren't surge protection devices; they may filter a few of those, but they should be protected too.
• reaperducer 6y ago
  I live in a place where blackouts are very infrequent (perhaps a couple per year) Ouch. Does anyone know where the author lives that a couple of times a year is considered "infrequent?" Decades ago I lived in a rural area of America where we'd have power outages two or three times a year because of storms. But I've lived in more than a dozen cities since then, and the power has only gone out twice. Once about a decade ago during a tornado, and then again last year when the power company replaced a transformer across the street. I ask because it's my impression that electric service has gotten much more reliable over the years. There are still access issues where I live now (believe it or not, thousands of Americans don't have access to the electric grid at home), but reliability seems improved. Am I living in a bubble when it comes to electricity?
  • formerly_proven 6y ago
    I've had at least a hundred times more power outages due to protection devices tripping (usually true positives) than the grid going down, so spending 20 minutes to figure out which socket would be the best choice to hook all the communications stuff up to is a much better investment than buying an UPS. FWIW, I had more downtime with the UPS than through actual grid outages because the UPS didn't like a battery hotswap and powered off, or because the batteries started to gas off hydrogen sulfide, which required disconnecting them immediately, but the UPS then powered down (without a battery) and couldn't start without one, either, so it required rewiring a little bit to get going again. Edit: My UPS is a line-interactive rack-mount APC unit, which as I understand things don't actually contain a power supply, so everything runs from the battery voltage and is supported by the charger in mains operation, but without a battery inserted the charger doesn't work, because its control circuit is powered by the battery.
  • croutonwagon 6y ago
    I live in florida. And in an area where most power is overhead. Storms during the rainy season usually means i experience cuts. Usually 1-2 times a month for 3-8 hours ea from May-Nov Hurricanes are usually expected to be 3+ days at minimum of outage. Most recent ones were closer to 14 days. I have a couple gennys, and interlock kits with 30a hookups on my house during these times. I can run 1 genny on the whole house, or even 2 since i have a sub-panel with another interlock kit. The only thing i CANT run is my AC. But we have 2-3 window units/portables to get by. FWIW running generators for days at a time is NOT cheap. on my setup its about 20-30 bucks a day in fuel alone.
• neilv 6y ago
  The article correctly and importantly points out that there are many types of UPS. Most recently, I got a production-grade APC SMX1500RM2U for home. Another thing to be aware of, if your PC has a PFC power supply, is that it might reboot or have undefined behavior on event of the switchover to battery, unless the UPS is designed to avoid this.
• kcb 6y ago
  The cheap UPSs aren't very good and don't work well or at all with modern PCs. I've had several of these from Cyberpower that haven't let me down. Far more reasonably priced than APCs equivalents. https://www.cyberpowersystems.com/products/ups/pfc-sinewave/ https://www.cyberpowersystems.com/products/ups/pfc-sinewave/
  • greenshackle2 6y ago
    Same here, I've had no issues with the 1500VA version. It's line interactive so should still work if the battery dies, but I can't say that I've tested it.
    • csnover 6y ago
      I don’t know if their newer revisions are any better, but I bought a CP1500PFCLCD in 2011. When the battery died from old age, it cut power to all of the battery backed receptacles until I power cycled the UPS. When the charger failed a few years after that, it did the exact same thing.
  • NelsonMinar 6y ago
    Seconding Cyberpower. Even their cheaper ones do better than BackUPS and don't fail to pass mains power along if the battery fails a check. The PFC Sinewave you linked do some nice power conditioning. It's a big help for me when my house switches to backup generator. (Why yes, I live in California, land of multi-day power outages. Why do you ask?)
  • Terretta 6y ago
    I like Cyberpower for home A/V racks, and yes, that PFC Sinewave line. Generally the rack mount models, such as CyberPower OR1500PFCRT2U PFC Sinewave UPS System, 1500VA/1050W, 8 Outlets, AVR, 2U or CyberPower OR2200PFCRT2U PFC Sinewave UPS System, 2000VA/1540W, 8 Outlets, AVR, 2U. Very happy, and stopped having to replace sensitive flat screens in bad power zip codes (trees vs. lines every other storm, such as for the last week after Isaias).
• tmp1aa 6y ago
  FYI for the APC Back-UPS "Pro" - the "Pro" model's topology is line interactive. (Or at least my Australian 1500 version is, as well as the other "Pro" models I checked.)
• russellendicott 6y ago
  I recall from my years as a small business sysadmin that some of the Smart-UPS systems that have a serial connector for management access require a special serial cable. If you plug in a “standard” serial cable it cuts power to the whole UPS unit and your whole server rack loses power even if the batteries are fully charged. That was a bad day.
  • jlgaddis 6y ago
    Indeed. I, too, learned that lesson the hard way many, many years ago! I also know several other folks who learned that the same way that you and I did. Although I'm a bit "old school" and generally prefer serial (RS-232) ports, this is one case where the change to USB really was a huge improvement!
    • quercusa 6y ago
      Yep, sometimes there's nothing as loud as silence!
• beamatronic 6y ago
  I did a lot of research before I bought a UPS. The constant that I saw across various brands was that these batteries will die after a few years without any warning. They have to be replaced proactively. No if’s and’s or but’s.
  • sliken 6y ago
    I find that true of APC, but not of most other brands (best, triplite, cyberpower, etc) APC ships crap batteries and they often do not survive the warranty or die shortly later.
• EvanAnderson 6y ago
  My experience has been that inexpensive UPS units create more problems than they solve in the long-run. Spending more money up front to get a corporate-production-grade unit is worth the money.
  • olyjohn 6y ago
    This exactly. If your power only goes out once or twice a year, your crappy UPS is more likely to fail before it proves any value.
• mprovost 6y ago
  This reminded me of James Hamilton's (the AWS datacentre guru) writeup of the power outage at the 2013 SuperBowl. Specifically how the default configuration of backup generators is often to protect themselves, even if that means shutting down the things they are meant to keep running. In my own experience running a reasonably sized datacentre I was often surprised at how UPSs and generators reacted to adverse conditions. One thing with power that you don't want is to be surprised. But it's difficult to test this equipment so it's mostly a learn as you go experience. https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2013/02/the-power-failure-seen-around-the-world/ https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2013/02/the-power-failure-...
  • generatorguy 6y ago
    Electrical Engineers would determine the settings for the electrical protection of a generator. Mechanical Engineers would determine the settings for mechanical protection of a motor. To operate the equipment beyond thresholds would result in reduced lifespan or immediate and permanent damage to the equipment. If this is what the customer requires they have to specify that to the Engineer so that when the equipment blows up the Engineer is not liable. Diesel generators for hospitals and water pumps for fire suppression systems are generally set up with very loose settings as it is clearly worse for a patient to die or a building to burn down than to destroy a machine, and this requirement is in the specifications.
    • brudgers 6y ago
      Diesel generators for hospitals and water pumps for fire suppression systems Those systems also require regular testing by qualified personnel. NFPA 25 requires monthly testing of fire pumps and annual flow testing. For low rise buildings with inadequate municipal water pressure, a water tower might be cheaper and easier. NFPA 99 - Standard for health care facilities, requires emergency generators to be tested 12 times per year.
      • generatorguy 6y ago
        The testing would consist of running the diesel generators under load but not operating in abnormal conditions.
• dstaley 6y ago
  After reading this, I checked what topology my UPS is using and was happy to see it's line interactive. I have two CyberPower CP1500PFCLCD units, and am approaching the one year mark. It looks like the batteries are even hot-swappable, which I'm sure will come in handy when replacing them.
• mm89 6y ago
  I also have an APC Back-UPS. Mine are the Back-UPS 650 model, I have two of them. Both emit an annoying LOUD high-frequency capacitor whirring noise that is audible to my ears even when the loud AC intake fan is blowing in the same room. I'm actually shocked any company would ship a product in this condition, unless all their customers have hearing problems. It's a power strip... it's supposed to be silent. Not like a computer. If my batteries die, I'll just replace them with non-battery backup strips. Not worth the trouble for me living in a city where power goes out maybe once per year on average for 10 minutes, and I don't have servers that need to stay online anymore.
• rcarmo 6y ago
  My APC 950VA also died on me unexpectedly, although I suspect a power surge: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2020/08/02/1800 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2020/08/02/1800 But the main point in the article is worthy: UPS manufacturers have been skimping somewhat on functionality, features and quality over the past few years...
  • _rs 6y ago
    As far as power surges go, I always put a ZeroSurge in front of my UPSes - they have saved the day more times than I can count.
  • AdrianB1 6y ago
    No, the article is wrong: the low end UPS devices are bad on quality and functionality and lead-acid batteries in UPS devices is a lot shorter than some people would expect. I still have a few APC Smart UPS's bought in 1999-2000 running in my house; at the same time I had a few cheapies that broke after a few years, sometimes in spectacular ways (electronic exploded melting part of the battery case); I will not name brands, it is not worth. Since 2000 I changed cases full of batteries, usually every 2-3 years. The good thing with the APC Smart series is that it works even if it gives an alert that the battery is bad, but you will get a few minutes of power instead of 30-60 minutes (my server & NAS is very low power, 5% of the UPS capacity). I also set the server to shutdown when the battery is reaching 50%, so I never deplete the batteries. At the same time, the UPS on the water pump is usually running on batteries as much as it can, so I need to change these batteries after 2 years. I have both the server and the water pump in the basement, the temperature is around 16-20 degrees Celsius (winter-summer), when I was keeping the server and the UPS in the house the battery life was at half (~18 months). The heat and the deep discharge cycles are effectively killing batteries. I had the same type of battery on my motorcycles, one lived about 8 years and a second one 6 years, but in very different conditions: it was warmer, but almost no discharges.
    • zzz61831 6y ago
      Deep discharge is a factor, but not a big one, heat has very little effect, it only affects voltages at which battery will be considered overcharged or deeply discharged as specs are usually all for room temperature. I've used UPSes that discharge batteries no lower than 10.5 (no deep discharge) and only once in a couple of years and that charge them to and keep them at 13.6 volts under stable room temperature all year. All batteries lost most of the capacity after 3 years, two almost all of it, one had like 40% left. In five years only that one was still surviving short minutes outages, while initially was able to do a few hours. For comparison, I had one battery just laying around for 6 years in the same room without touching it and it lost only like 30%.
• epc 6y ago
  Buy an automatic transfer switch. Plug one input into a UPS, plug the other into either the mains or another UPS (preferably a different brand but identical power). I resorted to this after having multiple APC and Cyberpower batteries fail killing power (even with a line-interactive APC). I run my network (cable modem, router, primary eero AP) off this, no servers. Means we can typically stay online even when the power glitches for an hour or two after a storm.
  • _rs 6y ago
    Do they make these that have normal 5-15R plugs on them that don't need custom wiring?
    • tx-kun 6y ago
      Yeah, all I can find on Amazon are 30A or 50A. I thought it would be like those extension cords with timers you use for outdoor lights.
    • epc 6y ago
      The one I bought uses standard NEMA cords and outlets: "CyberPower PDU15M10AT Metered ATS PDU" https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00NEHUX08/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00NEHUX08/ — it’s overkill for my use case but was the smallest option I could find. I don't have any of the control modules (provide snmp/http APIs).
• AnonHP 6y ago
  One of the annoying things I’ve seen with the Back-UPS range from APC is that they all seem to have an audible alarm when it’s running on battery that cannot be turned off. The UPS will beep periodically until you either turn the UPS off or until mains power returns. This is so annoying that you can find instructions and videos online on how to perform a surgery on the UPS to disconnect the buzzer from the rest of the circuitry. Maybe APC really wants to drive users of its lower tier (and cheaper) UPSes mad with the beeps and force them to buy the more expensive Smart-UPS range that comes with a built-in option to turn off audible alarms. Well, audible alarms do have a place in such systems to inform the person that the connected devices or systems are running on a limited battery capacity. But forcing that at all times is a big annoyance.
  • somehnguy 6y ago
    During an extended power outage years ago I used my Back-UPS to keep my phone charged while I watched Netflix over cellular. I ended up wrapping the thing in a whole bunch of blankets and towels to muffle the obnoxious beeping. Huge oversight that there isn't any button to silence the alarm, there are plenty of reasons someone would want to do it. I meant to tear it apart and remove the beeper after that but never got around to it before the battery made it useless anyway. TBF it was a few years old at that point so the battery giving up wasn't unexpected.
    • somehnguy 6y ago
      I'm really curious why this got negative points.
  • moduspol 6y ago
    I just replaced my old APC Back-UPS with a new one. It lets you silence the alarm with a button press. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01FWAZEIU/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01FWAZEIU/ The beeping didn't really bother me but it does frighten one of my dogs.
  • rsync 6y ago
    "But forcing that at all times is a big annoyance." Agreed. The cyberpower devices do let you "silence" the alarm, but even with the alarm "silenced" the UPS will begin rapid beeping as the battery nears depletion.
• watersb 6y ago
  I had an APC UPS battery age out on me, after only a couple of months after purchase. Back-UPS XS 1500. I called their customer support, and they asked about the kind of equipment I had plugged into it. My main NAS motherboard had died, and I hadn’t gotten around to the full rebuild that was going to require. So I had ended up with about five or six cheap USB external drives, with those “wall wart” DC power supplies, strung along a couple of power strips that were plugged into the UPS. That plus a 27-inch iMac. It was generally not much power - not much surge to spin up, or to power up the Mac, and of course at idle was less than 100 Watts. APC Customer Support said that the power strips might actually be weirding out the battery. They sent me a replacement battery at no charge, and suggested that I go with a Smart-UPS, with their Power Distribution Units if I needed more outlets. I had always thought the rack-mount PDUs were a silly expensive replacement for a no-name power strip. But I had long had a keen interest in this sort of IT equipment fail, after witnessing some spectacular crazy failures in corporate, and losing the manuscript while I was writing a book on small-office IT practice. So I bought a basic PDU, and a Smart-UPS rated at something like 700 VA. That has been rock solid. Even better than a larger setup I had with some big CyberPower systems. I’m willing to go along with the cargo-cult of PDUs now. I would be quite surprised if there were any significant difference among the basic PDUs of well-known brands. I still have those USB drives. They’ve lasted about as long as the hamsters, not as long as the dogs.
  • rsync 6y ago
    "APC Customer Support said that the power strips might actually be weirding out the battery." I think it's more likely that you purchased a guerilla-remanufactured unit that was properly sealed and packaged to look brand new (with hologram stickers and anti-tamper seals, etc.) but had an old, already dead battery that was reconditioned just enough to last a few cycles after purchase. Did you buy this directly from APC ?
    • watersb 6y ago
      I don't recall the vendor but I believe I purchased the original Back UPS via Amazon. So, perhaps not quite the best. I bought the SmartUPS and PDUs from an authorized dealer that APC Customer Support referred me to. That worked out better.
• tx-kun 6y ago
  I was doing some researches about this very topic a couple of weeks ago and saw a post on Speciesworks (still trying to find the post). In that post, one Eaton rep replied that the ups device would shut down once the battery died to protect the devices connected to it. Teah, it's just this simple. This is just a byproduct so all those companies can boast their insurance coverage on damaged equipment you connected to their UPS. And guess what, most of the time you won't be able to get this insurance even if your stuff got fried, saw a few stories like these from recent Slickdelas posts of UPS.
• jlgaddis 6y ago
  PSA: When it comes time to replace your APC UPS batteries, check if you have a "Batteries Plus" (or similar) franchise in your area (in the U.S., at least). You can purchase replacement batteries from them for roughly half the price!
  • Bayart 6y ago
    You can get those 7.2Ah batteries pretty much anywhere, including Amazon. Just make sure you pick those with the right kind of tabs.
  • AdrianB1 6y ago
    In Europe, I buy the batteries from the factory and they ask for the old batteries in return; this way the price is lower and I have no problems recycling the old batteries, they are shipped to the factory (a few hundreds km away), dismantled for parts (lead, mostly) and used to build new ones.
• hinkley 6y ago
  As we were growing, we slowly converted a telco hardware server room into a real server room. Knocked out a wall to get enough room volume for a mini-split AC, removing the sprinkler head, moving the servers... And replaced all the wiring with plugs higher on the wall so that flooding wouldn't result in an electrical fire. So when it came time to move our staging database over to the new wiring, the head of IT unplugged the UPS from the wall, the UPS complains like UPSes are wont to do in such situations, and in the time it took him to untangle the cable and plug it into the new circuit, the UPS dies. Bad batteries that the health checks didn't detect. Unplanned shutdown of our shared database. Whups. And that is when management was taught about redundant power supplies, and periodic UPS maintenance.
  • dervjd 6y ago
    |And that is when management was taught about redundant power supplies, and periodic UPS maintenance. And hopefully about setting up monitoring on your UPS to keep track of battery health ;)
    • hinkley 6y ago
      The UPS was reporting as green. Not so much you can do when the hardware is lying to you.
• pcdoodle 6y ago
  Dell latitude laptops have OEM chargers that can run on 10-16VDC. The E6520 I use as a server takes about 6W to run at idle. Grab a 12V battery and a 5A SLA Charger, run your router/modem/server directly off the battery. UPS's take about 10W to just power the inverter. This gives up a lot of the battery capacity not to mention the losses from converting your power 2 times.
• EricE 6y ago
  I'm not sure line-interactive UPSs will guarantee a change in behavior in and of themselves since they are still stand-by UPS's but instead of cutting over to battery when in an over or under-voltage situation they attempt to correct it first. For critical loads where I don't want interruption I prefer online or double-conversion UPS's. Basically they have two inverters instead of one. The load runs off of battery constantly on the first inverter, and the second continuously charges the batteries. There is no cut over time when there is mains power interruption since the loads run from batteries. But I hadn't considered this dead battery scenario so that's another thing to add to the checklist of things to ask about. It seems that there should be a bypass mode if there is mains power to supply power to the load too all the time. I've found UPS's to be a mixed blessing - when the power does glitch they can save your bacon but the battery maintenance issue can cause their own outages. If I lived in Florida with their legendary lightning I'd just put up with it but I used to have UPSs on everything and these days I have really dropped down where I have them since we get maybe an outage a year and glitches are equally infrequent too.
• m463 6y ago
  I wonder if the tesla powerwall acts as a UPS. EDIT: I found an interesting thread about the powerwall, switchover and using a UPS: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/powerwall-2-ups-connundrum-and-solution.130085/ https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/powerwall-2-ups-conn... it appears the powerwall moves the line frequency up from 60hz to as much as 65 hz as a signal to the solar power inverters and that can trip up some UPSs which monitor 60hz as an indicator of "good power"
• dreamcompiler 6y ago
  I suggest building your own UPS with strictly DC outputs. Most of what you'll be plugging in runs on DC anyway. This does mean you'll need to dig into some of your equipment to find the DC access point, but on other equipment you'll only need to cut the wall wart off the end of the cord. You can choose your own battery and battery maintenance equipment for maximum longevity, and choose your own switched power supply with different tap points for different DC voltages. This is simpler and more reliable than AC line-interactive UPSes because synchronizing an inverter with wall-socket power is not required. Yes, you need some EE skills to build it, but the end result will be far more reliable than a cheap off-the-shelf UPS.
  • zzz61831 6y ago
    Yep, and once you start using custom DC UPSes the biggest issue will be battery chargers that kill lead-acid batteries. Things are better with LiFePO4 these days, but for lead-acid I haven't found a solution except for literally hacking a pulse charger and battery management on top of arduino.
    • dreamcompiler 6y ago
      I've had good luck with solar charge controllers for RVs, e.g. [0]. You have to drive them with DC of course but they're designed to be driven by very poorly-regulated DC like that coming from a PV panel. So a cheap AC/DC converter (either switched or linear) driving one of these things should preserve your batteries. Most of them also provide a DC load output which gets automatically switched over to the battery if the input DC (or in the case of a UPS, the input AC) fails. [0] https://www.rvweb.net/best-solar-charge-controllers-for-rv/ https://www.rvweb.net/best-solar-charge-controllers-for-rv/
• firekvz 6y ago
  I have 4-5 hours outages every day, I use 2 APC ups to keep my modem and router up, while I still work with my laptop. It works perfectly for me, these APC devices have given me at the very least 1500 hours of continuos internet access where I could work or entertain myself during the outages over the last 4 years, so I think the 180$ per unit it cost, was a pretty good investment in my case
  • zymhan 6y ago
    I was very pleasantly surprised when my power went out one day, but my UPSes managed to keep the Modem/Router and my PC running, and I got to finish my multiplayer game :)
  • beervirus 6y ago
    That’s a crazy level of downtime. Whereabouts?
  • bowmessage 6y ago
    I'm surprised to see that if the power is out in your area, that the power used to boost coax signals in your area is not out as well!
    • jcrawfordor 6y ago
      If the cable provider offers digital voice, they're required to have backup power for their infrastructure for at least 24 hours (or 8 hours under older regs) to allow for 911 calls. The power injectors used for cable amplifiers usually just have a couple of lead-acid batteries in them.
      • hackmiester 6y ago
        Just because they are required to do it, doesn't mean they do it. My source is experience.
  • bonestamp2 6y ago
    Why is there so much interruption to your power?
• guerby 6y ago
  If your devices are low power like a NUC, recycled laptop, DSL/fiber modem or NAS they'll likely accept 12V as input (or 12-19V for most Intel NUC for example). For these I wonder if instead of a UPS: buy two LiFePo 12V batteries with included BMS, two battery charger (AC to 12V DC), so you get a redudant 12V bus where to plug your devices. If above 12V is needed add two DC-DC converters eg 12 to 19V to add a 19V bus. Same for 5V. It shoud work and support failure of any one of the parts?
• knorker 6y ago
  Yeah "home quality" UPSs I've found cause more outages than they prevent.
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  Made me check my two APCs. They are both Line Interactive.
• ozim 6y ago
  I have a horror story with 700VA APC ES-B700G, I bought it for my NAS in case I would be updating its operating system not to have it turned off by random power loss. I had issues with power supply to my apartment once in 2 years or something like that. This model has "controlled by master" outlets which I did not use because I needed only backup lines connected to battery. That "controlled by master" thing would turn on once in 3 months without reason. Then one day there was no power loss and UPS flipped and turned off power to my NAS and to my devices. Battery was good power was there but switches flipped and my NAS was turned off without warning. There was no system updates, maybe just normal writes to the disk. Turned out my HDD WD-RED 1TB died because of that one flip. It would have been better for me not to have a UPS...
  • christefano 6y ago
    I’m sorry for your loss. It sounds like you used a Back-UPS unit instead of a Smart-UPS, which I’ve heard switches to battery 10x faster than the Back-UPS. After learning this I won’t use a Back-UPS for anything where meaningful data loss might happen. They’re great for lights, cable modems, WiFi routers, etc., though.
    • ozim 6y ago
      Thanks, it was just a faulty unit that I trusted too much. I was doing turn off tests with my NAS attached and it was switching correctly and NAS was not going down, I had couple RPis connected also not going down and notifications from NUT were in logs. Where my NAS was NUT server and RPis had NUT client. It was that one day when UPS malfunctioned in a bad time. Where my electricity provider was more reliable than UPS I owned. So bad risk management on my side.
    • zaarn 6y ago
      What you want is any type of UPS that is line-interactive (Smart UPS or BackUPS Pro), those convert line voltage to 12V and back to line voltage with the battery in between instead of having to switch the battery into the circuit. Basically means that it switches (almost) instantly and they don't depend on external voltage or frequency.
• eigthbits 6y ago
  I found this guide by Cyberpower to be a clear and concise explanation of the topologies of UPS offered and their benefits. Yes it's content marketing, but it's good. https://www.cyberpowersystems.com/resources/choosing-an-uninterruptible-power-supply-system/ https://www.cyberpowersystems.com/resources/choosing-an-unin...
• bob1029 6y ago
  Over the years I have lost a lot of confidence in UPS units which do not use double conversion topology. I have a fairly expensive line-interactive unit that can be tricked into doing bad things just by power cycling my laser printer which is plugged into the same circuit (but not the actual UPS). One day this caused me more trouble than it was worth WRT lost work. I would have been better off plugged directly into the grid and just taking the 100 millisecond voltage dip at the PC's power supply. This is one area where buying high quality PSU can go a long way. High wattage Seasonic units can ride through some pretty nasty conditions before needing any outside help. I also have a cheaper passive-standby modified-sinewave unit which has never misbehaved in terms of trigger conditions, but it is hot, noisy and otherwise does not inspire any confidence when it's running on its inverter. I would also never dream of plugging anything into this unit that uses a non-switching power supply. Again, I am faced with the reality that you get precisely what you pay for. I always assumed double conversion was expensive paranoia never for home use, but over time this has proven out just like everything else when looking at the value equation of technology.
  • PaulHoule 6y ago
    My own UPS system is focused around keeping the telephone system and one DSL modem up and running through 2 days without power. That way if there is a bad thunderstorm there is no panic about working at home, I can use a laptop and tablets and communicate as much as I need. I have a PC tower server and realized off the bat that it would not be feasible to supply it with backup power for any worthwhile period of time. If the power goes out it will crash, but it runs on ext4 and ZFS and odds are very good it will come back when the power does and put itself back together.
    • ComputerGuru 6y ago
      I’m with you on zfs (although it is a pain to restore overwritten metadata, that’s not a typical symptom of power/controller failure) but please change ext4 to jfs or xfs. Xfs has a bad rep from the early naughts in terms of fs corruption but actually addressed the underlying issues and today both those options are equally great. I’ve tested all three extensively with unreliable media (raspberry pi kernel dev testing on an sd card) and ext4 was the absolute worst.
• esaym 6y ago
  Kind of a lame article. He is complaining about his $50 consumer grade UPS. The minimum any server needs is the Apc SMT750 "Smart-ups". It takes two batteries, cheap ones last about 3 years, the replacements from APC can last between 5-7 years. But the unit can supply mains power with no battery connected and the batteries can be hot swapped easily from the front of the case. These are $300 new, but you can find them used on ebay between $50-$100.
  • amelius 6y ago
    Why is that lame? My smartphone has compute capabilities that come close to my home PC's, yet it has a battery that's much cheaper than $50.
• jpswade 6y ago
  I had this exact same issue with this exact same device. I never replaced it.
• linsomniac 6y ago
  Automatic Transfer Switches feel like a requirement for using UPSes to me now. Either that or redundant power supplies. I've had too many UPSes, both the BackUPS and the higher end SmartUPS, cause more downtime than they prevented, over around the last decade. When we moved offices 3 years ago I pulled our UPSes out, because all the outages the previous 5 years were caused by the UPSes.
  • smiley1437 6y ago
    Genuinely curious - what strategy do you use for unplanned power outages if you don't have a UPS? Just deal with the potential corruption?
    • linsomniac 6y ago
      Correct. This is for our dev/stg environment and desktops (where they aren't laptops, which are nice because they have their own UPS :-). But, our city has all underground power infrastructure, and the number of outages we've had has been very, very small. We do have BBUs on RAID adapters, but we also rebuild almost all our machines every other day, and have backups of everything as well.
  • Johnny555 6y ago
    But then your ATS becomes another potential point of failure. If you have so little trust in your UPS that you need an ATS behind it, I think you are probably better off without the UPS's. In my last job I had around 100 APS SmartUPS's (mostly 3KVA) in various wiring closets and in the ~3 years that I was there, none of them failed unexpectedly, but we had to replace a few batteries and/or entire units when they failed their monthly self check.
    • linsomniac 6y ago
      Sure, but I've never had one of those ATSes fail. For a sample size of ~15 over a decade. Where I've pretty much had every APC BackUPS and SmartUPS (mostly 1500RM 2U, some 3000 3(?)U, some 2200 floor units) drop power at some point. That includes being very liberal with battery replacement, the last one was <3 months with a new battery. I would say that they seem to be reliable within 3 years, It's outside of that 3 years that I've had problems.
• linsomniac 6y ago
  Anyone used those new LiPo UPSes? Wondering if they have a longer useful life than the lead acid, but haven't used them. Thought about getting a PowerWall for our new office, but they don't start providing power for 3-5 seconds after the utility power goes out.
• mirimir 6y ago
  I've always used line-interactive aka double-conversion UPS. Both because of the battery failure issue, and to protect equipment from crappy generator power. Basically there are rectifier and inverter circuits, with batteries on the DC side.
• nippoo 6y ago
  Where I live (in the UK) the power is reliable enough (one outage every 3-5 years) that I only tend to spec UPSs for devices with dual PSUs - one raw mains, one UPS-protected. I've had more UPS failures than mains failures in the past decade... and mains power will normally come back up, starting the equipment automatically, while failed UPSs generally require manual intervention to fix, and consequently much greater downtime...
• gsich 6y ago
  APC deliberately designs their battery case so that the battery will die.
• gsich 6y ago
  Some ideas: https://gitlab.com/esr/upside https://gitlab.com/esr/upside http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7839 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7839
• sparc24 6y ago
  I ended up in India during the lockdown. Power outages are frequent and so are voltage fluctuations. Most people have a generator. Most houses haves 3 phase power coming in. Basically anything over 3 kvA the utility guys put in 3 phase at 415V - 3 hot and a neutral. About 3 weeks ago we lost neutral which resulted in double voltage both my MBP chargers got fried including the long extension wires which are super useful. It also took out an AC, a refrigerator, 2 air purifiers. Anything connected to the BackUPS did survive including the 65" oled tv. Luckily we managed to fix all of fit with simply replacing the PCBs. Being stranded with my laptops would really have sucked. Since I am stuck here til next July I started fixing some of this. More than anything else power conditioning was the single most important thing. Anything with any reasonable switch-mode power supply will be fine on a line interactive UPS, most people don't need to spend $ on an online UPS - esp if your power is fairly clean. We had old locally made generator so I finally replaced that with a nice single phase 25kVA generator. The alternator has voltage regulation. For the mains power I was told most people just put a Servo Stabilizer but I didn't want any moving parts so found an IGBT based static stabilizer instead. http://anjalipowersystem.com/static-stabilizer.html http://anjalipowersystem.com/static-stabilizer.html https://download.schneider-electric.com/files?p_File_Name=JSII-5YQSBR_R1_EN.pdf&p_Doc_Ref=SPD_JSII-5YQSBR_EN https://download.schneider-electric.com/files?p_File_Name=JS...
  • unholythree 6y ago
    Get phase monitors for your condensing units. There’s nothing more annoying than loosing a compressor due to your poco’s incompetence when the compressor would be just fine if something locked it out as soon as the power got weird. I did a compressor change out on a package system last year because while we apparently sprung for all sorts of other “options” on the machine apparently the line was drawn on a $48 phase monitor. Our cheaper machines had them and rode out our service being single phased, and the package units stage two was thankfully off at the time; but we still had few thousand dollars of compressor needlessly converted to a piece of scrap metal.
• jgeada 6y ago
  After many horror stories with APC UPSes: - failed battery caused APC to stop operating even with power (just as in the original post) - stopped charging battery even though battery was still good (blow electrolytic cap. When I into the circuit that capacitor was rated for 14V on a 12V trace, ie no guard-band. Seriously, skimping on maybe $0.01 total parts cost to leave a system at risk of fire??? Who the heck signed on on that decision???) - couple of data center APC UPSes caught fire. On the plus side the emergency systems kicked in quickly enough that the only damage were the UPSes. Anyway, that was a few too many stupid failures. APC is on my "never ever buying from this company ever again" list.
• sytse 6y ago
  tldr; when a cheap UPS battery is failing the UPS will fail even when the main power is on. I got personal experience with this failure. Maybe the thinking is that in case of a power outage you don't want to find out that all your UPS devices fail at the same time. But in this case a 24 hour warning would have been much better.
• mrslave 6y ago
  The biggest value my UPS gave was keeping the home broadband running (modem & wifi) in a sustained black-out. It impressed everyone a lot, except me. Keeping a whole system running for a while was my real intention, but I quickly learnt there were real shortcomings with my no-name brand purchase.
• neves 6y ago
  Is it easy to find a battery that fits inside my UPS? Any orientation how to do it?
• gerdesj 6y ago
  "I live in a place where blackouts are very infrequent (perhaps a couple per year)" I live in a fairly rural place (Somerset, UK) In this particular part of the county, outages are approaching "per demi-decade". A recent boiler room explosion in a BT phone exchange caused my office to lose power for about 10 hours but my home, which is about a mile away, was fine. I kept the genny topped up at regular intervals. The many but small UPSs we use keep things running for the 10-20s that the genny needs to fire up and settle. At home I have several small UPSs to keep things running for about 45-60 minutes. The esxi (Dell T320) in the attic gets shutdown after five mins so that everything else up there gets more time. Anyway, its all about risk assessment, monitoring and understanding your gear. A Back-UPS is not the same as a Smart-UPS - output waveform and response to load etc. Also, your UPS should be self testing every two weeks. I have several APC Smart UPS 1500VA and others. The 1500 jobbies are something like 15 years old but on their third set of batteries at least. When apcupsd whines that they are getting on a bit we buy new batteries and swap them in on-line. My golden rule of thumb is do not buy a battery from a firm that you do not recognise. Do not skimp and save pennies over something that can explode or simply be rubbish.
• francis_t_catte 6y ago
  Two things about Lead-Acid or AGM based UPS's (regardless of UPS topology or design): 1.) check your battery health annually and replace bi-annually. I don't care about the battery quality, an always-online UPS is very hard on lead-based batteries. they're float charged basically all the time, and deep discharged during outages. if you're in a power failure prone area (i.e. more than one per year), invest in a generator too in order to avoid stressing the batteries with full discharges. 2.) check the battery float voltage with an actual volt meter to make sure the UPS is calibrated correctly. APC UPS's in particular, prior to and post the Schneider Electric buyout, had a lot of really poor cost-savings decisions applied to their enginnering. this included using a carbon film resistor-based voltage divider to measure the battery voltage on much (or all) of their Back-UPS and Smart-UPS range. if you don't know anything about resistor technology, carbon film resistors (especially cheap ones!) change in value due to temperature, humidity, and age, usually drifting up in resistance. this is a bad thing when you need a stable voltage reading... oh and on APC's cost cutting measures; there's the fun time they stopped using nickel plating on the bus bars in their Symmetra UPS line. they switched to tin plating instead. apparently none of them had heard of tin whiskers. :)
  • extrapickles 6y ago
    Some APC UPSs will check battery health monthly by switching to battery, and letting them run down. You will want to disable this feature as it takes 6-8hrs to recharge to full, leaving a massive random gap in coverage. This also puts undue wear on the batteries as they are only good for a dozen or two cycles.
  • dn3500 6y ago
    Another fun fact I discovered the hard way is that many APC UPSes refuse to go back into bypass when they are supplied by a small generator with a dirty waveform. We had quite a few APC units in the 1990s and 2000s, and I had the impression the older ones were easier on batteries. We were on a three year replacement cycle until Y2K, and after that we found it necessary to check the batteries every six months or so in the newer units.
  • dan-robertson 6y ago
• nqzero 6y ago
  i've had 2 APC Back-UPS fail (of 2), and in neither case was the battery dead. That entire line is significantly worse-than-nothing as a backup
• softinio 6y ago
  Funny enough I have been considering getting a UPS. Should I ? If so, any recommendations?
• noipv4 6y ago
  I weigh my UPS battery every year and compare it to the original weight that I had printed with a label maker. Over the battery lifetime (2-3 years), there had been around a dozen switchovers, and the only reason of failure I could think of is the electrolyte evaporating because of a warm interior of the UPS. This gives me an idea, of how much water is lost, and at a certain cutoff, I just replace the battery.
• spookware 6y ago
  I work on these all the time. Problem is normally cheap charger. Try and find a ups that puts load on the batteries everyonce and a while. Good luck. This is hard and never done. We got sick of UPS sitting there for sometimes years and then when needed - batteries collapse and the whole thing comes crashing down. I have worked on UPS that are in charge of maintaining power to DP systems. When they fail you get things like oil rigs pulling off station costing millions. The company I work for just finished putting batter powered thrusters on an oil rig. First one ever. Don't have a job right now. Rather sad.
• hrishios 6y ago
  If you're ever inclined, lead acid batteries can be easy to repair and diagnose lifetime for - depending on the type. Sealed ones are harder but not impossible. Open ones take a little more maintenance but have long lifetimes and practically indestructible if you service them often. The most common cause of death is sulfate build-up, which can be prevented (and often reversed) with a homebrew circuit[1]. 1. https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/sulfation_and_how_to_prevent_it#:~:text=If%20a%20battery%20is%20serviced,block)%20for%20about%2024%20hours https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/sulfation_and_ho....
• deleted 6y ago
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• securepower_io 6y ago
  "All UPS systems require regular intervals of maintenance. The availability of a system configuration is dependent on its level of immunity to equipment failure, and the inherent ability to perform regular maintenance, and routine testing while maintaining the critical load. As the configuration goes higher on the scale of availability, the cost also increases." (APC White Paper 75)