I need to buy a UPS. The last one I bought is a Belkin Universal 1000 VA. It’s a nice unit and very well built, but the way it works is strange. If it’s programmed to shut down the PC e.g. 10 minutes after the power fails, and the power is restored in less than 10 minutes, it switches back to line power OK, but then it still shuts down the PC at the 10 minute point when it’s happily up and running on normal power - does this make sense to anyone :?
Belkin tech support seems to be a mailbot that responds “be sure the battery is fully charged” no matter what the question so I’m looking for recommendations for other brands that folks have good experience with.
All of my servers have their own software to determine what they need to do. When the UPS sends the signal it is off main power, they decide. All UPS does is provide the signal as to what is going on, how much power it has etc…
Most of my servers wait 30-40 minutes or more before doing anything. One never shuts down and two have an autowakeup device to restart when the UPS says they can.
Depending on your location... you'll [i]maybe[/i] hit shut down time once every couple of years or so.
Power at the Belkin's location has been down for more than an hour twice in the last 9 days. It's only running the CPU so I guess I could just get a bigger one. The reason I like the timed shutdown is that the battery doesn't run down completely. A lot of times the power comes back for a few minutes, dies again, and then finally comes back. I'm concerned that it wouldn't save enough juice to do a graceful shutdown the second time.
All of my servers have their own software to determine what they need to do. When the UPS sends the signal it is off main power, they decide. All UPS does is provide the signal as to what is going on, how much power it has etc…
Most of my servers wait 30-40 minutes or more before doing anything. One never shuts down and two have an autowakeup device to restart when the UPS says they can.
Hmm, I’m not sure who’s on first then. I had the impression it’s the UPS that’s telling the PC to shut down, because the UPS itself shuts down (no power out of the UPS supported outlets - even if it’s back on line power) shortly after the PC shuts down.
The unit is not really a UPS but a power conditioner with a UPS. Its the size of a small filing. Its an old mode made by ONEAC.
In our configuration, the UPS doesn’t shut anything down but itself. It does that when the batteries reach a certain level.
There are two lines for notification.
It has a on off line which shows whether it is on main power or battery…
You can use this like a cheap UPS on where you watch dtr to see if it is up or down. This is used by dumb servers that simply shutdown properly when the see this happen.
The second is a data line that provides detailed info about its status. Main or Battery, Amount of time left at current draw, current draw, last test etc…
For servers that can use it, this lets you be smart for the important boxes. They can watch the power of the unit and if it hits a threshold then decide. If some boxes shut down, the rate of drop slows and others can stay on longer.
As for software, some of them are using perl scripts that were home grown or written by others. The really smart stuff was a package I can’t recall off the top of my head but expensive.
Most of these are Unix boxen, mainly Sun Solaris, SCO (old) and Linux. also a couple workstations all WinXP. I also have the network stuff on it (just dies if the power runs out) and a switchable light.
AZ is prone to line spikes and drops occassionally.
At my most remote location [3 hrs drive away]
I am using a APC PowerChute Personal Edition with everything except
the monitor running through the UPS.
It has a USB interface & with a fully charged battery has a runtime of 43 minutes before it will shut the PC down.
I have been at the site when there have been frequent under/over
voltage spikes happening but the PC doesn’t have a problem.
If the outage is longer than the run time then the PC will start up when
AC power is restored.
I have been using it for 11 months & am very satisfied with it.
No, no, no, no!!! I don’t know if all UPSs are affected, but at work we had problems with RCDs tripping out in one of the computer suites. It took quite a long time to find that we had a nubmer of small UPSs sat on a larger UPS. The UPS suppliers told us this was not a good idea and was likely to cause strange earth leakage problems as well as cause other problems.
At my most remote location [3 hrs drive away]
I am using a APC PowerChute Personal Edition with everything except
the monitor running through the UPS.
It has a USB interface & with a fully charged battery has a runtime of 43 minutes before it will shut the PC down.
I have been at the site when there have been frequent under/over
voltage spikes happening but the PC doesn't have a problem.
If the outage is longer than the run time then the PC will start up when
AC power is restored.
I have been using it for 11 months & am very satisfied with it.
That's interesting, I'll look at APC again, maybe they updated the software. I used an APC with powerchute under '98, but when I changed to w2k the software wouldn't work and APC's answer was to let w2k manage the UPS but like a laptop battery, not as a UPS, which was a disaster. For my remote site I built a restart controller to outwit the Belkin and now it all works just fine, but now I want to add a UPS at home.
I use 3 APC UPSs and a Belkin. The oldest 2 APCs and the Belkin are all very good - most reliable. However the newest APC (and the cheapest) has caused a lot of trouble which I’ve never really gotten to the bottom of. I think it may be over sensitive to power variations - one of the symptoms is intermittently switching between mains and battery every other second but because it can’t run the ‘normal’ Powerchute software, but instead the personal version, it doesn’t give you any diagnostic information. After being on soak test at my parents 1/2 a mile away for the past 2 months it was fine. On re-installation here it’s back to it’s old ways. I guess the moral is to buy a UPS which has decent software!
I’m using a couple of APCC UPS’s. They are manged by the server/pc OS ups management and have run wonderfull for years now. Ocassionally I have to replace the batteries. One of them, a 700VA model, is running at 100% all time, so it has a drain time of about 4 minutes , but thats ok.
Hi!
I’m running an APC BE500E, which does fine whenever there’s a power failure. We’ve had several due to the hurricanes passing by! The worst problem I have is if I need to reboot my CPU or shut it down for some reason. Then the APC fails to be recognized by the CPU and tells me it is not connected to the APC on restart. The only way I can get it to be recognized is to shut down the CPU then the APC and disconnect the USB connection prior to powering up the CPU. Then when I get the notice the APC is not connected, I plug in the USB and everything is AOK! Sure am tired of this procedure! Does anyone have a fix or solution to this problem?
I have the APC 1000 unit. What I do find is that the APC needs to be plugged directly to the CPU, a hub seems not to do the trick. I would keep getting the “now I am connected, but no right now, but I am restored” and it is a bit irritating. So. I find that it needs to be connected directly to the CPU. Some odd quirk, but it does work.
Unplugging and replugging doesn’t work for me! Only the procedure I outlined works for me. Incidently, I clled APC Support and thats what they suggested.
I bought a small APC UPS (300w), removed the small gel cell battery, added some wire with alligator clips onto the the UPS battery leads, and attached a 100AH sealed lead acid battery (sits in it’s own plastic battery box under my computer desk). Works fine without having to use the APC Powerchute software. The only thing plugged into the UPS is my PC box. I run Win2K and have WD plus my seismic programs in the Start Menu.
Everything has been working well this way for several years and I have a LOT of AC line dropouts.
, but thats ok.