So what exactly does a UPS do?

[Andvari]

So if the power flickered on and off as if the apocalypse was coming, bombarding my outlets with countless surges... would a UPS keep my computer on as if nothing happened, AND protect it from the surges?

If so, I need one, and I need recomendations on which one to get since I know nothing about them apparently.

 

[Mik3y]

yes it would. I dont know which ups's are really good or bad.

 

[tr1kstanc3]

yes a UPS is one of the best peace of mind and useful pieces of equipment you can buy for your expensive electronic gear. i highly recommend one by APC and at least their 1000watt version. i have the APC XS 1500 model i got at a discount for $125. it has enough power to keep my pc (specs in sig), 17" samsung monitor, and sony vaio laptop running for 30 minutes on no AC wall power. i have it connected to my dsl modem so when the power does flicker or go out i can still surf the web on my laptop for a few hours... how is that for geek?

 

[Zepper]

There are some battery backups that are true UPSes that power the attached components full time off the battery. Thus your equipment will never see what goes on on the AC line which is only used to keep the batteries charged. Those generally cost a multiple of what a "standby" type battery backup costs - which is what most of them are. They have a slight switching time when a dropout is detected. So some surges can get through. And now there are some hybrid designs that are supposed to have an operating paradigm somewhere between the standby and full-time UPS - called line-interactive or some such.
. It all depends on the level of security you need and how much you're willing to pay for it.

.bh.

:moon:

 

[Mark R]

All PC PSUs have a small degree of surge supression and 'hold-up' time. Most will keep your PC going for about 16 - 32 ms without power, more if your PSU is significantly oversized. There are small surge supressors built in to protect against minor surges such as come from fridges/freezers/AC kicking on or off. This won't maintain your PC through most noticable mains power disturbances, similarly a large power spike will toast the protection in the PSU.

There are several types of UPS depending on price range:

Basic: These connect your PC to mains power, and if UPS detects a problem with mains power it switches over to an inverter running from batteries.
Line interactive: Like basic, but if there is a brownout they are capable of boosting the mains voltage without switching over to battery.
Double conversion: Mains power is filtered and converted into DC, which is used to power an inverter and charge batteries. The PC runs off the inverter at all times.

The Basic is the cheapest as the expensive inverter circuit only needs to run for 5 - 10 mins at a time. The Double conversion is most expensive, and significantly increases your electricity costs - but it provides very clean power as the power is always generated by the internal inverter so there are no glitches with brownouts/blackouts/surges. For most cases the glitches that do get through a basic UPS will not significantly upset a decent PC PSU.

All UPS contain a modest amount of surge protection - although most consumer grade ones don't contain as much as a high-performance dedicated surge protector. A major surge is likely to end up damaging either the UPS or the PC or both. If you are paranoid, getting a 'maximum protection' surge protector and running a UPS off that is probably the best option.

 

[sharkeeper]

To add to Mark's post, there is also the ferroresonant UPS that has the advantages of LI and DC without the disadvantages. True isolation from the mains, unsurpassed surge and lightning strike survival. Additionally, the inverter runs only when the power fails or falls below pre programmed standards.

These are typically found in police dispatch centers, hospitals, datacenters, and casinos. Anywhere a power anomaly can be a problem and the customer is not particularly concerned with expense.

Cheers!

 

[golgotha]

could i run other appliances of a ups? such as a refrigerator?

 

[Mark R]

You could run anything you want off a UPS, as long as the UPS is powerful enough. However, UPS units are expensive and only keep the power going for 5-15 minutes (unless you pay for extra very expensive batteries). You have to think whether you can justify the expense of a UPS.

A fridge or freezer will stay cold for hours without power - keeping the power going for another 15 minutes with UPS is essentially worthless (unless the fridge contents are exceptionally valuable). Essentially, a UPS is only worthwhile if you cannot afford a brief, unexpected interruption to your power. If your building is being rewired or there is a major power outage, a UPS alone won't see you through.

On a PC you get the opportunity to save your work and shut down safely.

In a factory with critical production stages the UPS can prevent loss of product. But factory sized UPSs are expensive, and only worthwhile for very specialised products.

In a hospital, you can keep your monitoring equipment going until the generator can be started. At the hospital I work at they have standard APC UPSs on their blood analyser machines. I had an emergency sample to analyse, and only had enough blood for one go at the analysis. The UPS allowed the analyser to complete the analysis when the power went out. (As an aside, these analysers seem to be the only thing at my hospital with UPSs - the ORs, cardiac monitoring equipement and ventilators don't have them - not even the IT infrastructure uses them).

 

[Lazy8s]

I got an APC UPS 1500watts and it's the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

Last year in the dorms a few of us decided to throw a private LAN party in one of the rooms downstairs. Well there was only 1 outlet in the room and I had the only UPS so we started chaining surge protectors end-on-end from my UPS. All-in-all we got 8 comps hooked up. The 9th guy (running a 500watt pow supply and 2 monitors) pushed his plug in and all hell broke loose. The generator room next to us started screaming and then there was a loud "BOOM!!" and the dorms fell black. My power supply started screaming like the end of the world was comming and we were all like "Holy sh!t we just blew up the building!!!" and started running over each other to get to our comps. Luckily we all had enough time to get our comps safely shut down. In fact, I still had time to shut down the UPS and it STILL WORKS to this day!! Will it last again? Who nows but it sure worked once and that's what really counts. When the fire department showed up a couple minutes later they gave our RA (one of the guys at the LAN) a firecode violation for having the surge protectors chained by even they were stunned that my UPS worked....heh I should get paid by APC to tell this story for advertising

 

[9KingDiamond9]

for a single computer, I use a Powercom Ebook EBK-500S. You can get it here: http://www.axiontech.com/prdt.php?item=16430
It's a real good UPS for $45 bucks, it's stood up to several surges already.

 

[PhoenixOrion]

APC are the best in the business. 350VA rating and above a must. The higher the better.

 

[imported_Bunter]

Got an APC unit for my wife's business system. This was due to issues of power going down and back up rapidly during severe thunderstorms (which we seem to get our share of). While her existing surge protector probably kept the spikes associated with that sort of thing evened out, it still is not good for the PC.

If I remember, we have a 725va APC, which the software monitor claims will power her PC (430-watt PSU), NEC 1760NX, cable modem and router for 18 minutes. That is more than enough time for her to finish what she is doing and properly shut down once it becomes obvious the power is not coming right back up. That also makes the frequent and rapid power losses a non-event.

 

[PhoenixOrion]

good points.

surge protectors do just that...protect pc from surge and spikes, which are most harmful.

you have to also take care of your pc from dips/lulls and sudden loss blackouts.

backUPS will take care of all 3 instances.

 

[Zepper]

Most "UPS"es put out a modified (stepped) square wave output instead of a true sinusoidal wave form. They don't recommend that you try to run items that have AC motors off that type of UPS.
. Some UPS have true sine wave output - which would be fine to run appliances within their load rating. Be aware that appliances like refrigerators put large initial loads on their power sources each time their motors crank up - might trip the circuit protection on a UPS.
..bh.

 

[corkyg]

Definitely, yes! It happened 4 times to me this morning - little quickie interruptions like when a power source is switched up the line. My two UPS's both worked - one for my computer and the other for my modem and router. I was on-line and never missed a beat. Just a few flashing red lights and beeps - but they were fast - less than a second. If not for the UPS's, I would have had 4 reboots and a reinstall of the modem and router.

 

[andre1000]

Hey zepper. I'm new here. How do I PM someone?

EDIT
After reading some of the replies I thought I'd add my own experiences. All of my UPS's have
dead batteries after about 2 years. I don't think I have ever had them run more than two minutes
until I shut down. I expected that. When I bought them on clearance they were never used. That should be ok for a lead acid battery. I didn't test them a lot but I probably tried them a couple of times to see if they would hold up.

See they were like 250VA for the monitor and 250VA for the computer. Enough for say 10 minutes of
operation. But after 2 years and only having them beep maybe 10 times when there was a quick
spike or power drop. not power off just a dimming that I didn't notice. They were pretty much
dead.

I tested them last week and they don't hold a charge. So of course they don't hold up.
Two years! and hardly ever really using them. We don't have lightning storms. And from my
experience with switching power supplies. Those are the kind your computer has. They are very
tolerant to spikes and surges. Because they have at least two levels of control. And the switching
takes a big portion of the surge and dips and smooths them out. That's because that's how they operate
anyway. It's a little long to explain. But I believe you need surge protectors only where there's industrial motors and big machines like in a factory. Or where there's lightning. Otherwise surge protectors are
not needed IMHO in places like California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington. Places with little lightning.
Places Like Texas, Oklahoma for sure. I have heard of lightning hitting water lines and running underground tearing up the ground like a snake and blowing off the top of a tree that it snappped over to. Pictures I've seen show entire walls beiing blown out where there was enough metal that the lightning
jumped around pipes and wires. But a surge protector is not going to help under dire circumstances. They're good for small lightning storms. The big ones the best thing is to unplug the power. stay off the telephone. And sit quietly and pray maybe listen to a battery radio.

Mark R (I was a field service tech worked at Stanford, and UCSF) mentioned that UPS run for a few minutes. Usually they'll run for as long as the battery is
charged up enough. They also have to put out enough power each moment in time to operate whatever
is running. So it might not run a refrigerator but it would run a laptop for 5 hours. On the other hand.
IF you put a really BIG battery on a small power ups. It would run the laptop for maybe 20 hours. But still not the refrigerator. Because there's enough juice in the battery to keep a small item running.

But a larger item needs more immediate power. And a bigger battery is not the part that supplies the actual
AC voltage. The circuitry in the UPS has to have big enough parts to supply large amounts of 110 voltage
whether the battery is big or small. But again a big battery in a small UPS would keep your computer
running for a long period of time generally.

Mark R and zepper. I wanted to find out more about 'double conversion' full time UPS. And like
I mentioned. Can I make my own with an INVERTER and batteries.

I had some questions about Full time UPS's. Like what do you know. Where's a good site
to go to?

Can I make my own?

that kind of thing.

thanks

andre

PS. Also I was on your 'buy my stuff ' page but no link for email. maybe it's me.

lemme know and if you can pm me go ahead. I think Ihave it on.

andre

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Lazy8s
I got an APC UPS 1500watts and it's the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

Last year in the dorms a few of us decided to throw a private LAN party in one of the rooms downstairs. Well there was only 1 outlet in the room and I had the only UPS so we started chaining surge protectors end-on-end from my UPS. All-in-all we got 8 comps hooked up. The 9th guy (running a 500watt pow supply and 2 monitors) pushed his plug in and all hell broke loose. The generator room next to us started screaming and then there was a loud "BOOM!!" and the dorms fell black. My power supply started screaming like the end of the world was comming and we were all like "Holy sh!t we just blew up the building!!!" and started running over each other to get to our comps. Luckily we all had enough time to get our comps safely shut down. In fact, I still had time to shut down the UPS and it STILL WORKS to this day!! Will it last again? Who nows but it sure worked once and that's what really counts. When the fire department showed up a couple minutes later they gave our RA (one of the guys at the LAN) a firecode violation for having the surge protectors chained by even they were stunned that my UPS worked....heh I should get paid by APC to tell this story for advertising

Very interesting story. But the realist in me suspects that you guy probably didn't cause the problem, although I can't say for sure. Clearly, you were drawing too much current from that one-outlet power circuit, but I don't see why that would have caused a "Boom" anywhere, it should have (if the place was correctly wired to spec) just tripped a circuit-breaker or blown a fuse. It's possible that the total electrical failure of the building was triggered by the "Boom", and thus your UPS had to switch to battery-power, and since it was clearly overloaded, it started "screaming in pain", rather than having directly caused the power-outage. (APC UPSs *do* have a rather nasty wail when they are overloaded or have problems, I had a 280VA unit do that to me once.)

Or perhaps you did just simply trip a breaker/fuse, and the "Boom" was a resultant symptom of that (gas-powered generator starting, due to power blackout, and failing, perhaps backfiring?). You did say that the generator room was next-door, that actually would make sense then. Sounds like you guys did some free testing of the back-up generator, and maybe it wasn't properly maintained or checked lately.

I have a 500VA Tripp-Lite UPS myself, and I've had it powering two rigs sucessfully when the power went out. I would never run my main rig without a UPS, they really are a life-saver.

 

[OMG1Penguin]

Try working in an office with 90% of the computers on UPS's, and the power goes out. It's pretty funny when they all start to die.

They're all like, "help us, help us!"

And then you're like, "Die Bitches"


And they do die~

 

[BillBright]

Unless I missed it, one of the main advantages of an UPS was never mentioned - that is, most UPS built for PCs have a data connection and software - when the UPS senses that it can no longer hold your system up, it will "gracefully" save all open files, close all apps, and shut your system down. The more advanced software will hold the UPS off after the power is restored until the batteries have enough holding power again to gracefully shut the system down if necessary. XP has internal support, but of course, it is VERY basic.

APC is recognized as the leader. However, CyberPower, Triplett, even Energizer make various sizes. I agree with the one poster to get at least a 500VA - this will easily supply power to a PC, LCD monitor, and all your home network gear. I have a CyberPower 1250VA UPS that supplys power for 2 PCs (3.06HTP4, and XP3200), router, cable modem, WAP, and Print server, 17in LCD and 17in CRT monitors. When a squirrel decided to see what would happen if he stood on one wire and grabbed another (can you say Crispy Crittered?), I stayed up for 45 minutes and shut down because my room was getting too hot with no AC.

Note it you have a CRT monitor, and you want it on UPS, which is nice when you need to see what you are doing, I would get at least an 800VA UPS. CRTs consume too much power. In the squirrel story above, I let the CRT stay asleep until after I shut down my first system, then woke it up to power down the second.

IMHO, considering the cost of the PC and Monitor - not to mention the often unmeasurable cost of the data - NOT using an UPS is foolish.

As far as other uses, I have a 1500VA on my Home Theater system for the TV and Ampifier - which, in turn, protects my speakers, including the sub-woofer. It will run the big screen TV alone (which is how we usually watch it) for over an hour. With the amp on, cranked up watching a DVD, it will last about 10 minutes - still plenty of time to shut down.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: BillBright
Note it you have a CRT monitor, and you want it on UPS, which is nice when you need to see what you are doing, I would get at least an 800VA UPS. CRTs consume too much power. In the squirrel story above, I let the CRT stay asleep until after I shut down my first system, then woke it up to power down the second.

Just a word of warning, if your CRT does a "degauss" when resuming from sleep mode, or powering-on, be careful if you are running it off of a heavily-loaded UPS. The additional current-draw from the degauss may overload the inverter and cause it to shut-off dead. That happened to me once, when the power went out, I had my CRT turned off at the time, and I had two rigs running off of the UPS. Oops. Lession learned.

Originally posted by: BillBright
IMHO, considering the cost of the PC and Monitor - not to mention the often unmeasurable cost of the data - NOT using an UPS is foolish.

Completely agreed.

Originally posted by: BillBright
As far as other uses, I have a 1500VA on my Home Theater system for the TV and Ampifier - which, in turn, protects my speakers, including the sub-woofer. It will run the big screen TV alone (which is how we usually watch it) for over an hour. With the amp on, cranked up watching a DVD, it will last about 10 minutes - still plenty of time to shut down.

Wow, that's pretty good runtime, all things considered.

 

[Kniteman77]

Voltage Regulation !!

 

[BillBright]

Yes, I was very please with the run time - but it is one of those DLP (digital light processor) monitors - which are quite efficient - and gorgeous I might add.

 

[NeoPTLD]

Originally posted by: Andvari
So if the power flickered on and off as if the apocalypse was coming, bombarding my outlets with countless surges... would a UPS keep my computer on as if nothing happened, AND protect it from the surges?

If so, I need one, and I need recomendations on which one to get since I know nothing about them apparently.

UPS is no different from a surge protector when it comes to surges. Under normal conditions, most UPS directly connects its output to utility power. When the voltage becomes too low(and too high on some model) on input side, internal transfer switch isolates the load from AC power and switch over to battery power.

Connected load have just as much chance of being fried as being connected to a good surge protector in a major surge such as a direct lighting hit to a power line.

UPS is a good thing to have if you experience frequent power outage. It will let you get through multiple episodes of very short outages without losing power to computer. Should you have a longer power outage, it will let you gracefully shut down your computer.

It should be oversized about twice what you need if you want to get more than a few minutes of backup. Consumer UPS's are only made to deliver a few minutes of power at full load.

 

[ultimatebob]

Originally posted by: golgotha
could i run other appliances of a ups? such as a refrigerator?

Yes, but I wouldn't recommend it for a few reasons:

• Refrigerators use a LOT of power while the compressor is running. You would need a UPS of AT LEAST 2000 VA to keep it from overloading.

• Batteries go bad in a UPS, and you need to replace them every 2 or 3 years. They aren't cheap, either, espically for a large UPS.

• Refrigerators don't really seem to care if the power is out for less than an hour. They're well insulated, and they'll continue to keep things cool while the power is out as long as you keep the door shut. Things like Computers and Tropical Fish Tanks seem to be a lot more tempremental without power, though.