UPS Recommendations please!

[Mike-Bracknell]

Originally Posted by Saab Dastard

I have a SmartUPS 1000 - APC branded replacement batteries are £162 all-in, 3rd-party eqiuvalent replacements are £62. Hmmm... for the effort of swapping over the spade connectors I can save £100!



The trade-in for an equivalent model would reduce the price by £71 to £278, although you can buy that model for £30 less on amazon (granted they won't take the old unit away at no cost).

I'll be buying 3rd party batteries and carrying the old ones to the dump (sorry, recycling centre) on my bike!

SD

Just be aware, there are batteries and there are batteries.

The Yuasa ones are recommended.

I've also had a couple of experiences replacing UPS batteries where the supplier sent the (subtly) wrong part. All goes well until you have the whole thing in bits on the server room floor wondering why the goddamn beeping won't stop!

Not to mention the one in 1992 which threw me 10 feet across the server room when an internal part had failed and I was auditing the plug sockets a little too closely.

[ExSp33db1rd]

....instead, use the power fail signal to start an orderly shutdown.

We've just experienced a 'weather bomb' i.e. rapid drop in pressure accompanied by very high winds and lashing rain. ( yes, it does happen in New Zealand - often )

I should have know better, and shut down the computer, 'cos this Met. condition always results in a power outage - with an overhead supply threaded through trees this is inevitable - and I then usually disconnect the computer, and other gear, until 'normal service is resumed', but this time the power was off and on in about a milli-second, enough to switch everything off, but immediately on again. Fortunately no apparent damage, so far.

Would this device have started an orderly shut-down, even tho' the power came straight back on again ?

[Bushfiva]

You'd typically set it to send the shutdown signal after a short while, say a minute or so. You can do rough calculations of power draw to make sure you start the shutdown with plenty of power left in the UPS. But on consumer-grade equipment, nothing you can afford is going to power stuff for more than 10 minutes or so, especially at end of service life. In your case, if you have frequent transient outages, you might want to spend a little more on a unit that does full-time line conditioning.

In my case I have good power, outages are almost unknown and I want my network to shut down in an orderly manner, so I have the computers run for a minute before they shut down, the NASes power down at 5 minutes and the routers, etc. run until their UPS is depleted. Hopefully there's no network traffic by that stage. Although all the devices are set to turn on when power is restored, I've also set the router to send everything a WOL packet when it powers up and at regular intervals thereafter just in case. I shut down early rather than late because I may want the remaining UPS power for other things.

There are more sophisticated ways of doing this, but I can't be bothered.

Incidentally, I also have battery-powered LED lighting that comes on if the power goes down, and the network powers down if it gets an earthquake alarm, 'cos I may want to grab the NAS and exit without much ceremony, but the computer stays on because I want to see where the quake is and when it will get here