Anyone familiar with UPS/backup?

[Cochese]

Sorta related to my cutting thread, but also distinct so I didn't post there.

For the sake of argument, I have two places where I need battery backup for the time being. The first is my primary workstation, the other is where my network equipment is. The desktop is a dual-monitor, mid-range gaming desktop (approximately). The PSU recommended for my tower is 400w, but I can't tell you exactly how much power it uses. My requirement here is enough time to safely shut down, five minutes would be enough. The network equipment (modem, router and VOIP) pulls about 20w if my math is correct.

I have currently an APC RS1200 UPS, albeit with bad batteries. I was given this awhile back, but I can't verify the status of the unit without good batteries. It turns on, gives a battery replacement light, so I assume it works. Battery replacement for this varies from $30 to $100. I don't have a RJ-45 to USB cable, so if I use it for my desktop to shut down automatically I will also need to order or build a cable. Probably build. For the network corner I would like something that lasts at least an hour. With that low of a wattage load, I shouldn't think that's a problem.

Basically, I need advice on what to do here. Do I buy batteries for the owned unit, use it with the desktop or network and buy another unit for the other or buy new for both? The replacement batteries for my unit, I was considering purchasing from refurbups.com. In a perfect world, I would prefer a wall-mount unit for my desktop so that the wiring would be neater, but it's not a deal-breaker. A wall-mount unit for the network would be nice, but it's not as required.

[dbhost]

Just for the sake of argument here, it would effectively depend on your network equipment.

But with the size UPS you have, that should be more than enough for the desktop. Assuming nothing else is wrong with it, replace the batteries and you should be good to go. I am using a 11+ year old CyberPower CP1500 UPS for my desktop, although I had to use a serial to USB adapter to make it work, and I won't be able to use it for auto shutdown with Windows after I upgrade from XP on that box...

My network gear is running off of another old CyberPower CP585AVR. There is no manner of auto shutdown, and for the most part it doesn't matter. There is no critical volatile memory in any of the networking gear. Everything important is flashed into firmware... So power just dropping out is not that big of a deal. The beeping of the UPS lets me know it is coming anyway, and the workstations / servers shut down LONG before the network thinks about going away...

To tidy the wiring up, use Velcro straps to bundle things together. I am in the process of remodeling a smaller bedroom to move my home office into, which means most of my network / computer wiring is presently willy - nilly, but that will change upon install into the new location. A BIG reason for the move in the first place is to organize, and better use our spaces...

[atgcpaul]

I think you'll get the best performance if you buy a new UPS for your PC. Not only will you get a new battery which you need anyway, but you'll also get the correct cable.

I have a 350W or 400W power supply on my desktop at home. I don't do any gaming on it, though. I put a Kill-A-Watt on it when the TV tuner card was recording two shows at once. It never went above 150W. I don't plug my monitor into the UPS, though.

In my experience, UPS manufacturers really stretch the truth on how long their batteries last during an outage.

[capncarl]

For the sake of argument. Is there anything on the computers that vita that you must have power to keep it running. If the answer is no then move on to the other valuables in the house that might better benefit from an alternate source of electricty, like your freezer full of valuable food.
capncarl

[Cochese]

Just for the sake of argument here, it would effectively depend on your network equipment.

But with the size UPS you have, that should be more than enough for the desktop. Assuming nothing else is wrong with it, replace the batteries and you should be good to go. I am using a 11+ year old CyberPower CP1500 UPS for my desktop, although I had to use a serial to USB adapter to make it work, and I won't be able to use it for auto shutdown with Windows after I upgrade from XP on that box...

My network gear is running off of another old CyberPower CP585AVR. There is no manner of auto shutdown, and for the most part it doesn't matter. There is no critical volatile memory in any of the networking gear. Everything important is flashed into firmware... So power just dropping out is not that big of a deal. The beeping of the UPS lets me know it is coming anyway, and the workstations / servers shut down LONG before the network thinks about going away...

To tidy the wiring up, use Velcro straps to bundle things together. I am in the process of remodeling a smaller bedroom to move my home office into, which means most of my network / computer wiring is presently willy - nilly, but that will change upon install into the new location. A BIG reason for the move in the first place is to organize, and better use our spaces...

Wire management was only a bonus. I should be able to hide the wires well with it being on the floor, it just would have been easier.

My network devices are a SB6141, a DIR-655 and an Ooma box. Between 6w and 9w each, from reports.

I think you'll get the best performance if you buy a new UPS for your PC. Not only will you get a new battery which you need anyway, but you'll also get the correct cable.

I have a 350W or 400W power supply on my desktop at home. I don't do any gaming on it, though. I put a Kill-A-Watt on it when the TV tuner card was recording two shows at once. It never went above 150W. I don't plug my monitor into the UPS, though.

In my experience, UPS manufacturers really stretch the truth on how long their batteries last during an outage.

I ordered a Kill-A-Watt today and I'll know exactly how much juice everything needs on Wednesday. I agree about the overstating, which is why I'll test it myself. All I want for the PC is to save programs and a controlled shut down. I'll need to have the monitors plugged in because of what I work on, I'll need to close out my connections or save any spreadsheets. The cable doesn't seem that big of a deal. I have a ton of USB cables about, and all I'll need is an RJ-45 (or -50, some confusion) and wire it up. Shouldn't take more than ten minutes to wire up. For the newer ones, they come with USB-B cables, and I have a few around from old printers.

For the sake of argument. Is there anything on the computers that vita that you must have power to keep it running. If the answer is no then move on to the other valuables in the house that might better benefit from an alternate source of electricty, like your freezer full of valuable food.
capncarl

I consider my work and my data to be more important than anything else in the house to keep running for a few minutes. I'm talking like five minutes is what I'm aiming for, which should be accomplished by either buying the replacement batteries for under $50 shipped or a $90 new UPS.

I'd like to get an hour or so out of the network so I can switch over to my laptop for anything crucial. If we're talking about power loss in the scope of days or more, I have bigger problems than work and they understand that.

I don't generally get power outages, and just about everything in the house is on a strip, not that it will help in the face of a direct strike. It's for those, 'hey, we need to take down this line for a bit to do some work on' kinds of things that are the majority of my outages.

I might want to pick up a third for my pedestal fan. It gets hot as crap during the summer if the power goes, but that's usually when I head for a restaurant or the library.

[dbhost]

For what it's worth, I have one each of the CyberPower CP1500AVRLCD UPSes on my cluster nodes, and iSCSI SAN filer / RAID shelf, the current price on them is insanely low for this particular UPS at just over $100.00.

I know CyberPower doesn't have the name recognition that APC has, but they build a heck of a good UPS. Been using them a LONG time and have been very happy with them...

None of your network gear listed has the built in capacity to shut down gracefully from a UPS signal. BUT, it is worth keeping the stuff up while your systems power down gracefully. With a 1500VA UPS, you can power both your network, AND your desktop for at least a half hour, depending on your desktop config. My cluster nodes are basically desktop boxes with extra NICs and many core CPUs loaded with RAM. I can run each node for 75 minutes before upsd sends the shutdown signal... I can't say how long the 585 will keep the network gear up. If you look at my post about my network rack, you can see it is pretty intense. External NAS disk, Buffalo WZR600DHP router, Zoom 5341J modem, 16 port gigabit switch, 2 8 port gigabit switches, and an Obi VoIP adapter. Power was off for over 2 hours, and the network never went down...

[Cochese]

Yeah, I was actually looking at the 900VA Cyberpower for $90 locally. Brand between the two isn't important to me.

Not too concerned about graceful network shutdown, but it would be nice to continue working and more importantly not have to power cycle the components when the power goes out.

[dbhost]

For the difference in price, I am not sure I would be willing to step down to the smaller unit. But then again, I happen to love big UPSes and long run time... The 900 should do what you want it to do and then some.

Mind you, I have had APC UPSes in the past, if you are confident in your ability to stab new batteries in the one you have, that IS a good unit.

My CP1500 and CP585AVR both had the batteries replaced from Amazon on the cheap. Less than $30.00 for the CP1500, and maybe $18.00 for the 585. I had a 685 the original battery burst in so it was toast.

The APC UPSes I have owned in the past were big tanks with metal cases. I threw fresh batteries in them ran those for years, but the batteries finally got to be impossible to find, so they went to the tech waste collection day in Houston...

If you are confident that the UPS is functioning well otherwise, the batteries aren't leaking / burst, and you can handle swapping the batteries out, then try to keep the APC going. It's a good, strong unit, with excellent software support. But if you waiver at all on any of those points, don't bother, just recycle the thing and grab a new unit. Better safe than sorry right?

[gerti]

Not a big APC fan, they seem to be very hard on the batteries and other oddities. My "favorite" was a APC rack mount unit in a datacenter 3000 miles away that would shut off every night because of a failed battery check. It ended up causing way more trouble than no UPS at all.

Anyway I like the CyberPower units a lot: low cost and pretty solid. Currently I have three of those already mentioned CP1500AVRLCD units and a few smaller units, all without trouble so far. Batteries seem to last quite a bit longer before needing replacement compared to the APC units I had in the past.

The only minor issue I have is that the CP units which are hooked up to OS X give a false positive about once a day for a few seconds. Probably a long-standing bug in the driver that comes with OS X misinterpreting a self-test result or some such.

If lightning is an issue, a whole house surge protector (installed at the fuse box) may be an option. Any unprotected device on the wired network can push a power spike. I had lightning striking in the neighborhood kill a bunch of equipment twice within 4 days. That wasn't fun and quite expensive. Got the whole house protector that week. Would it have helped? I don't know, but I sleep better...

[woodturner]

If lightning is an issue, a whole house surge protector (installed at the fuse box) may be an option. Any unprotected device on the wired network can push a power spike.

FWIW, a surge capacitor is another option, and can be a good idea to use one in conjunction with a whole house surge protector. Delta makes two versions now and recommends one of each. Cost is around $20 each at an electrical supply store.

If cost is an issue, these capacitors are a reasonable replacement for a whole house surge protector, at much lower cost.

Edit: prices may have increased since I bought mine, looks like going rate is $30 to $40 now at the electrical supply house or on the web.

[dbhost]

Not a big APC fan, they seem to be very hard on the batteries and other oddities. My "favorite" was a APC rack mount unit in a datacenter 3000 miles away that would shut off every night because of a failed battery check. It ended up causing way more trouble than no UPS at all.

Anyway I like the CyberPower units a lot: low cost and pretty solid. Currently I have three of those already mentioned CP1500AVRLCD units and a few smaller units, all without trouble so far. Batteries seem to last quite a bit longer before needing replacement compared to the APC units I had in the past.

The only minor issue I have is that the CP units which are hooked up to OS X give a false positive about once a day for a few seconds. Probably a long-standing bug in the driver that comes with OS X misinterpreting a self-test result or some such.

If lightning is an issue, a whole house surge protector (installed at the fuse box) may be an option. Any unprotected device on the wired network can push a power spike. I had lightning striking in the neighborhood kill a bunch of equipment twice within 4 days. That wasn't fun and quite expensive. Got the whole house protector that week. Would it have helped? I don't know, but I sleep better...

More detail on the OS-X issue on the CyberPower UPSes would be helpful. I am not a Mac guy per se, but I am wondering, is it the built in UPS monitoring software that Apple builds, or is it the CyberPower software that you are running? I thought the Mac UPS software was more or less based off of upsd which is an open source product I use with CentOS to monitor my CyberPower UPSes.... (The CP software for Linux is CLI only, and not networkable, upsd can integrate with NUT which means the UPSes can be checked across my network etc...

I will say, several models of APC UPSes were known to be battery killers. Particularly the old 1000VA units.... However that 1200 is fairly decent. The big problem I have with APC versus CyberPower other than the cost issue, is the APC units aren't as well marked for battery connections, you need to be super careful on what wire goes where or you let the magic smoke out...

[Cochese]

I went a bit cheap on the network side, since I'm trying to add funds and all.

My rationalization was this: my router and modem use about 10W combined (measured with my new Kill-A-Watt). When I add Ooma it shouldn't be above 20W total. Looking at runtimes for comparable APC units, a 550 VA/330W will take a 50W load and run it for over an hour. The curve continues to go in my favor less than 50W.

For that reason, I picked up a 550 VA/330W Cyberpower unit I can hang on the same board my router and modem will be on, and leave the floor for some storage I'm considering. It was $40. I'll test it either tomorrow or Friday and get a good idea of how long just the modem and router would last.

[Cochese]

I unplugged the UPS at 1pm and it's still chugging along. I have some streaming music going while I work, so I should know pretty accurately when it cuts out.

[atgcpaul]

Just curious, did you put the kill-a-watt on your PC and what did it report?

[Cochese]

Haven't been able to afford the downtime to do it yet. Perhaps tomorrow or next week.

The little Cyberpower cut out just shy of four hours with just the modem and router. Figure perhaps half of that with the Ooma also plugged in. Two hours is plenty, I think I made the right choice.

I just have to decide between ordering batteries for the APC or buying a new Cyberpower.