Grrr. Sun's out but it's grey skies indoors. The category tag for the thread header is indeed suitably-coloured. After the umpteenth power cut resulting in lost work and one dead SSD, I've decided it's now definitely time to sort out a UPS (unless anyone has an alternative solution). Trouble is, as the title suggests, I have no idea where to start, what I need etc.. I had a poke around many years ago and found this, this and this but don't know if these are even appropriate. If anyone could advise either what I should be looking for or even a good place to start assessing my needs, I'd most certainly be grateful. Cheers in advance all!
Whatever you buy, buy one with replaceable batteries if you can. [and make sure you can actually get replacement batteries for it] Beyond that it's not really my sphere of knowledge. But, like PSUs a lot will depend on what you need to keep powered, and how long you need to keep it powered for.
The question boils down to "what does it need to power, and for how long?" A £100 floorstander will give you enough time to save and shut down, but if you want something that is going to keep you running a bit longer than that then prepare to shell out £££s I'd recommend doing some power draw calculations (or better still, tests) and then using APC's UPS calculator to find something that fits the bill.
We bought a dozen APC UPS's to back up workstations at work about 8 or so years ago. Seemed reasonable enough and only recently did we start getting battery warnings. Since then we have moved office which has a whole building UPS so we scrapped the individual ones. This is probably the modern equivalent: https://www.scan.co.uk/products/900...ec-outputs-540w-lcd-interface-built-in-avr-bl Typically found that the workstations running full tilt (CPU calcs only) were 200-300w so don't go overboard unless you have a power hungry GPU running at full power at the same time.
Cheers guys! I think my needs will be limited to powering up to two desktops and a laptop (plus two screens) in order to do exactly as you say - save and shut down. I'm guessing a max of fifteen minutes or so emergency power (to allow for some faff time) - should also give enough time for the mains to come back on as sometimes these power cuts are more like temporary blips than extended outages, but that's obviously enough to reset the desktops. To head off the obvious question, the battery on the laptop is at the end of its useful life and it runs off the mains now, so I don't trust it to have enough reserve capacity to perform the necessary. Saying that, I think it does save the system state upon shutdown, but I don't want to rely on that either. I'll check that calculator out but for info, Core Temp says I'm using 60-70W at ~10-30% load, doing admin and internet tasks. Is there such a thing as an alarm on a UPS that lets you know the mains power has gone off and the batteries have kicked in? That way, I'd know to start saving work. PS. Just did the calculator, have left the above text in to show how far out I was in my understanding of these things. I put "gaming laptop", 2x 27" screens and 2x 100W desktops as the requirement - the calculator gives me more expensive options than I was thinking, with a fraction of the backup runtime: Am I missing something? Is there a cheaper option than this or is this what UPSs are all about? EDIT: Another question - why do these blocks often seem to have a bunch of three pin kettle sockets, rather than three pin wall plug sockets to seemingly plug into? Are you supposed to run kettle-to-kettle leads from the UPS to the appliances?
That looks about right tbh, you can find that 2200va one for closer to £250 if you shop around a bit. They all beep on battery power, and the C13 to C14 plug thing is normal on UPSs but you can just buy a power strip with a male connector on it and plug your bid into that if you prefer. It's not the done thing but it will work.
Yes they have an alarm that goes off on loss of mains. The arrangement is 3 pin to wall and then double ended kettle lead from ups to desktop. I'm fairly certain they come with some leads by default. We found running two desktops off a ups was still more than enough to shut down safely. 10mins easily, probably a high safety margin in the calculation. There are also ups that look like extension leads but much smaller battery
I have a couple of cheap powercool/walker ones from CCL that seem to do the job, I bought them when we were having some issues and it was a pain to get the network back up and running as Sky hub would become master of all the network and we couldn't get to the outside world after an outage without powering everything down. Able to run my lower power systems and networking gear for at least an hour, fan is pretty noisy if hitting it hard, Doesn't seem as good as my APC ones from work but suits my needs, been running for a couple of years. I have a couple of different sizes from 650 -2200VA and was about 50 to 130quid. for leads look for IEC ups leads, loads about cheap.
FYI Kettle cables are C15 and these are C13 and C14 Kettle cables have a keying in the lower area (this is what I get for spending hours looking at cable codes for work last week!)
Ha! I will not try and boil water on top of my Northbridge in that case. Not with an insufficient lead! Thanks for the input, guys - appreciated. Had two more cuts again yesterday afternoon, so I'm going to have to get on this before I go nuts. I'll have a dig around and see what model options I can come up with
It might be worth spending £15 on an appliance monitor, you could plug the whole shooting match into an extension lead and see exactly how much power you're using.
Oh dear. I've spent far too long (the whole day) on Amazon's sales pages trying to see where I can save a few quid on things I'm only going to buy later anyway, which has led me to these options UPS-wise: Tecnoware EXA PLUS 1500 UPS - Uninterruptible Power Supply for PC GAMING and CONSOLE - Low Noise - 8 IEC Outputs - Autonomy up to 30 min - Power 1500 VA : AmazonSmile: Computers & Accessories Eaton Ellipse Eco 650 IEC UPS - Off Line Uninterruptible Power Supply - EL650IEC - 650VA (4 outlets IEC-C13, Shutdown software) : AmazonSmile: Computers & Accessories APC Back UPS 950VA - BX950MI - UPS Battery Backup & Surge Protector, Backup Battery with AVR, Dataline Protection, Uniterruptible Power Supply : AmazonSmile: Electronics & Photo APC Back UPS 1200VA - BX1200MI - UPS Battery Backup & Surge Protector, Backup Battery with AVR, Dataline Protection, Uniterruptible Power Supply : AmazonSmile: Electronics & Photo With the net result of me knowing sweet Fanny Adams more than when I started. Can anyone at least cross any of the above off and I'll just take a punt on one of the remainder? Thanks guys - appreciate the patience with this...
^ This. In the highest capacity you can afford. Make sure you have a bunch of C13 to C14 cables to hand as I believe they only put one in the box!
If I were to power a consumer router, which is an AC adaptor on UK mains, how would I go about connecting it to C13 ports? I've been wanting to add UPS to my router + home assistant area for some time now. Only draws ~30w in total.
Just another vote for APC as a trusted make. If its just to stop power blips I would probably just lump for the 900 VA model. Chances are internet is down if the power cut is longer so not much need for more uptime that a few mins unless you have a specific need (e.g. long running CFD simulations, renders, calculations etc.)
Righto - makes sense, thanks. Logically, if I'm out and have left the machine on (or hibernating), I doubt anyone else is going to be able to get to it in time or know what to do to shut it down safely and if I'm in, then I should only need ten minutes to do so. Incidentally, if it's hibernating ie. system state saved to disk rather than RAM, will a power blip affect this? Also, @wyx087 - out of interest, why are you fussed about keeping the router/home kit powered for what might only be say 20/30 minutes or so until the batteries are done (dependent on size, power draw of course)?
Baaa, too hot to sleep. My main concern is keeping Home Assistant running and accessible to know state of home at all times. We only ever very rarely get momentary cut to electricity, so a UPS to tide over should help to tide over. The definition of hibernating is that system is saved to disk rather than sleep where it saves to RAM. So it should survive power cuts. This is the reason at extremely low state of charge, laptop are configured to enter hibernate by default, saving your work and prepare for complete loss of power.
