I am looking for a UPS as part of my home server / NAS upgrade.
The server is physically in Taiwan, which is 110v land. However, because of problems with the home wiring that my family and I don’t have the means to remedy in the foreseeable future, my servers run off a 220v circuit and I can’t move them to 110v without causing problems.
The server is physically located in a bedroom so noise would be a problem.
I am shopping for a UPS locally but the options that exist locally basically all fall into the following categories:
Server grade high quality unit with pure sine wave output, but has active cooling and probably going to sound like it is going to take off.
Units from local manufacturers. Manufacturer claims will be able to handle my gear, but their feature set for that price is a complete ripoff compared to the 110v offerings from Cyberpower / APC (For example: $220 for a 1500VA unit without pure sine wave output and from the local brand FTUPS, brand has some questionable history regarding warranties online, Cyberpower 1500VA pure sine wave 110v unit costs about the same)
There is one manufacturer that claims you can use a device that has APFC on a stepped sine wave UPS if you oversize the UPS by 1.5x.
To my knowledge you can’t even buy a power supply that doesn’t have APFC these days even if you wanted to (excluding places like Aliexpress of course). The power supply I plan to use is a Seasonic Focus GX unit (If I end up using no UPS or a normal UPS).
I have the following questions:
Will power supplies with APFC work on a stepped sine wave unit?
What are the potential problems that might arise in the long run? (like 5 years down the line)
Will I be better off hacking together something with HDPlex DC-DC modules and a pack of LiFePO4 cells?
Edit:
From what my friends working in IT, they said that PSUs with APFC will work on stepped sine wave units. (will work here meaning that they will power the device correctly) but I don’t have any concrete evidence
If you have an electric fan on, it can mask the noise. If you live in a condo next to a major road, it wont matter much. The ambient noise will be higher.
A computer will happy run on even the ugliest “modified sine wave”. I tested a unit I bought recently, and even though the waveform looked like this under load, my computer has been happily running on it since.
Some other devices, usually monitors, will suffer from loud and drastic vibration in their power supply on a modified sine wave ups. So don’t plug in your monitor.
The “if you 1.5x the capacity” guy is probably trying to minimize the distortion that can occur at max load. Not terrible advice but for a PC it’s not necessary.
Most likely not. I’ve only had bad experiences on that front. the UPS was tripping the PSU due to the stepped sine wave. Square waves, even worse.
Damage to the APFC circuit resulting in dead PSU, constant unexpected shutdowns.
Absolutely not! To “hack” something like that together you’re gonna a BSM for LiFePO4 cells and correctly cablibrate it for them. Also HDPlex doesn’t make the DC to DC modules anymore.
They are no louder than an air cooled gaming computer. Frankly if you are worried about quality and longevity this is the direction you should go. Get a nice double conversion unit you like then just understand you will have to service the batteries until the hardware gives out in 15-20 years.
This UPS will only handle computers and some networking gear
They say it’s because the APFC circuitry may cause higher apparent power when the input isn’t a pure sine wave and possibly overload the UPS
Those things are all over the place
Yeah should have worded that a bit clearer, I meant the DC-DC ATX modules in general
Power outages aren’t that often so I’m not that concerned. I just need it so that my server can safely shut down when that event happens maybe at most twice a year.
That depends on whether you have " noise sensitive equipment" such as shortwave, am, hf radios, or sensitive test gear.
But for most pc uses no
Any power supply is electrically noisy to a certain extent.
Amateur radio operators use linear power supplies for the emi noise prevention.
Switching power supplies are lower cost, use smaller components to maintain a stable output voltage regardless of minor input power fluxuations, but because of the rapid switching circuitry they are very noisy.( emi)
You can often track them down with a simple am radio.
Although on some monitors emi can show itself as occasional flickering or wavy images.
So this might be a thing to test for before you drop a bundle on a new monitor or graphics card.
Idk much about this, but I use a consumer-grade UPS that I salvaged from its future fate as ewaste when I worked for Batteries Plus Bulbs. I just used my employee discount to put new High Rate SLA batteries in it, and it was good enough. It has been useful several times already.
prefacing this with obligatory that lithium packs without a BMS is not a thing. Don’t do it
renogy make pure sine inverters with a grid transfer switch. it’ll use grid as priority and then flick to DC when the grid goes away. Been using it as a UPS for years
since youre on 220V anyway, it’ll work fine
it’s trivial to get a 100Ah life pack, a renogy inverter, a BMS and a charger and you’ll be way under the cost of a double conversion unit, lithium even more so
life packs come with the benefit of 90% discharge depth, runs for hours and hours and if kept properly will last thousands of cycles