I did not think something through. I bought a UPS with the below specifications noting that 99.9% of the time, I would not be exceeding 900W and in that situation, it would not be during a period of perceived possible power outages (i.e. thunderstorms). However what I failed to think of is, can the UPS pass-through more than 900W of power as if my computer was plugged into the wall? I assume the limitation is on the battery and the ability to replace power in a loss of power event no?
From what i can tell from the manual and spec sheet you have a pretty hard limit at 900W output at least for anything attached to the battery backup outputs, even in a situation where the battery isnt being actively used.
Youll know when you have that situation because the unit will start beeping at you until you reduce the load.
Theoretically it might be able to stand being over 900w for a few seconds because theres normally a bit of overbuilding when it comes to high current electricity but I wouldnt recommend testing it out.
Most likely a fuse or breaker of some sort would prevent a disaster in the case of an extended overload situation but better not to find out the hard way that it didn’t work.
Plus, as the battery and power delivery circuits age they become less efficient and warm up a little more than they used to so if it starts out being able to soak 915 watts it may not still be able to do that 3 or 4 years later.
If you use the non battery outlets it should theoretically be able to pass through the full output of your standard 15 amp circuit but of course no battery backup. This one looks like it can only pull a total of 12 amps though.
I remember when I had my 7980XE and 2x 2080 Tis doing TimeSpy and I accidentally used my 5GHz profile. The death scream and subsequent power down occurred at ~1090 Watts.
The electronics and the batteries in a UPS are sized to support a maximum power draw. It just doesn’t work beyond that and that’s a hard limit.
In addition you need to consider what you want that UPS to do in the event of a power failure. Do you want it to shut down the attached hw? How long do you want/need it to sustain that maximum load in case of a power outage.
The typical UPS comes with batteries that can sustain max. load for 1-3 min. Barely enough to shut down the attached computers.
Make sure to look for the fine print. The minutes printed in large typically specify the time the UPS can sustain a 50% load.
Been researching this myself. I ultimately settled on a power conditioner instead of UPS (less maintenance/parts to replace every few years) since my power has never gone out so far.
So one interesting UPS I found essentially lets you bypass the battery and draw as much power as the wall socket allows. I don’t know why that would ever be a good idea or if I misread. I’ll have to run into the product listing again.
Battery research is also going ballistic at this rate. With batteries going below $50 / kWh on the cell level and $200 / kWh on the pack level, buying a 12.5kWh home battery at $2k-$2.5k is not that stupid of an investment anymore. So pretty soon us plebs might want to rethink how we wire our homelabs alltogether, I know some large datacenters are already installing Tesla Megapacks to replace / bring additional support to their UPSes.
If we look into the tea leaves a bit, by 2030, it is not unreasonable to expect 25 kWh house batteries to creep below $2k. There is something like a 70% chance of this happening at the moment, and rising. I would not bet the farm on it, but I also feel it is not something you should ignore, either. If the entire home lab could be set up on a common 10 kWh battery, I believe that would help a lot, especially with “dirty” power - but yeah, future tech isn’t exactly helpful today now is it?
One additional thing to consider - if this UPS isn’t powerful enough for this particular use case, you might press it into service for some of your other hardware.
For me, I have 3 UPS devices - I have one for my PC (1500 watt support), one for my home theater (1200 watt support, but I don’t connect the receiver to it), and another 900 watt one for my home networking (drives a few raspberry pis, a modem, a router, a small UPS, and a few switches).
It wasn’t cheap to do, but my setup is so much better now. I’m a lot less worried about power surges/brownouts/failures damaging my expensive equipment, and my internet doesn’t go out during a power outage.
So I’d say give the 900 watt one a try, assuming you’ve already purchased it. If it isn’t strong enough now, or even in the future, you might use it for other electronic equipment.
^^ This is all I need, why I opted for the cheaper. only paid $150, microcenter sale. If I’m at my PC and S hits the fan. I have that time for a safe shutdown. This is the computer I am at most of the day. Not one churning away in the closet. I was able to shutdown mid bg3 play-through the one time it happened this year so far.
I’ll give it a run, there are other items ex-weather out of my control that was really behind it. The battery idea was really for a tail risk. I’ll give it a test to see the power draw at full throttle.
Crosses out the possibility of upgrading from 11600k to 12th-14th gen though…cries
