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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 Back

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.

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.