I have been cutting down on my power requirements but still need a new UPS. Any recommendations?
David, here a link to a discussion “why are UPS such junk?” on the premier electronics discussion group.
And a suggested unit with Lithium battery (danger)!
Oops, for the American market, 110V, but you get the idea.
Thanks TP. I guess when outages are more often due to the UPS than the power supply then it does not make a lot of sense.
I have been in Brisbane for about 18 months and probably had 3 or 4 outages in that time. I think only one was over 2 hours.
Wow, i probably should have asked some of the questions you guys are.
I just got sick of a power outage triggering a 36 hour scrub of my 6 bay nas so i just grabbed this from Umart…
I’ve been very happy with it.
If that was a crap choice i think i’d rather not hear about it 
I gather your NAS is configured to shutdown when the UPS loses main power. I guess now it’s a question of waiting to see how well your UPS holds up.
My previous experience with NASes is they worked OK but the batteries degrade fairly quickly.
In a homelab environment the main issue will be, whether there is enough juice left in the batteries to perform the shutdown sequence. This should be less than five minutes.
I feel that David has again hit the nail on the head. Every UPS is very similar as far as the electronics is concerned. Probably the differences between low end and high end electronics are:
- Serviceability
- Repair documentation
- Thermal design
The batteries have always been the weak point, with lead avid being:
- Most common
- Very heavy
- Bulky
- Expensive
- Lifespan of 3 - 5 years
While more modern batteries such as LIPO represent a danger that lead acid don’t, mainly fire and explosion.
The key to having a reliable UPS (in my opinion) is to have one with a dummy load (not hard to build) so that you can switch your normal server load to the dummy to facilitate load testing to ascertain current battery life. This should be done automatically and regularly with emailed results to you for your records both before and after the test.
When I installed Banyan Vines servers in 1987, they had a self contained UPS in the server base (they looked like a tower pc), along with a DAT tape drive backup and they ran UNIX. This was in the days when servers ran for years with zero downtime and virus/trojans were non-existent.
It was Windows that introduced the world to all the worst horrors of computing.
Finally, we should all be aware that every retail UPS is incredibly cheap and built to a price. A decent PC UPS with inbuilt load and automation probably starts at $5000 USD.