Recently moved and I’m trying to rebuild my infra at my new place in the UK, so I am in the market for a good UPS. Unfortunately I have no idea at what I’m looking, a lot of bad reviews in the brands (APC, CyberPower, etc.) What would you suggest for a good (and decently priced) UPS?
Requirements:
- Battery to last around 15 minutes tops or so for a server to shut down gracefully in case of a power outage
- Software to tell the server to shut down (Windows)
Devices to support:
- One fiber modem
- One router (ThinkStation Tiny - M90q Gen 3)
- One PoE Switch with one AP (UniFi 10Gbpe switch + Wifi6 AP)
- One home server (Ryzen 3900x + 64Gb RAM + 14TB HDDs x4 + 3070 FE)
Pretty basic setup bro
get a 1500 VA APC UPS and it’ll come with a USB cable that Windows will auto detect and config.
Then reconfigure your power settings since it’ll suddenly think it’s on battery and plugged in so it’ll get different power plans.
APC is fine and powers most of the largest data centers the world over.
If you’re feelin frisky then steal all your neighbor’s car batteries and put them in parallel with an inverter and a trickle charger.
APC consumer UPSes are different than their enterprise grade ones, and all the different UPS manufacturers have different grades of UPSes that offer different features. Without going and looking at the same reviews you did, I’d guess the bad ones are probably all for the bare bone UPS offerings, as they’re an item of “you get what you pay for”.
The minimum feature set for me with a UPS are:
- “Pure Sine” output
This starts to get offered on the mid-range UPSes, and the cheaper ones all have a “Stepped Sine” output which a good number of devices can’t handle and is likely the primary cause of bad reviews.
- Line Interactive
Line interactive UPSes tend to switch to battery a little faster than the cheaper standby ones, I believe most “Pure Sine” output UPSes are likely to be line interactive. Your use case doesn’t appear to warrant the more expensive Double-Conversion type which has no switchover time, but are a little less efficient as they’re always converting AC to DC back to AC when they have grid power.
- User Replaceable Battery
Most UPSes come with a lead-acid battery that will eventually die after 3-5 years and will need to be replaced. These are generaly easy to find proper replacements, but sometimes a manufacturer chose a non-standard size to force you to buy a replacement from them.
There are some newer options that are using Li-Ion or LiFe batteries, but they’re expensive compared to the traditional Lead-Acid AGM/Gell Cell batteries that have been available for decades.
Not sure how much of a price premium the UK would have over US prices, but I’d expect to pay a minimum of £200 ($250 USD) for a reasonably decent UPS.
Last year I replaced all my UPSes with newer CyberPower ones and bought a couple of different sizes, the biggest I got was the PR1500LCD for my desktop which cost me $600, but was what I needed for all the stuff I have at my desk.
Yeah - I have used different UPS before (APC and CyberPower in particular). My question was about in the UK in particular, I saw some of them that do seem interesting from APC, however the one I had in NA seems WILDLY EXPENSIVE (566 to 405 GBP on these units, the one I had before was around 250 CAD and had these specs):
Any brands that I could trust for decent price-to-performance in this side of the world in particular?
I’m looking at this BGM2200B-UK APC unit and it seems to be the most decently priced at 400 GBP with sine wave, but only has four plugs, so no quite future thinking (I have limited space at the moment), but would there be a better alternative? that’s a pretty penny.
Something else that just came to mind is that a UPS unit with a 240v inverter might have some higher price premium over 120v ones. Not sure how true that really is, but I’m thinking about the various portable LiFe “power banks” from the likes of Anker, EcoFlow, etc, that were mostly 120v only in the US until relatively recently, and the units that are coming on the market are rather expensive.
I got a pair of Anker Solix F3800s for house emergency power as they’re capable of 240v output, but they have a 20ms switch time compared to the 4ms of my Cyberpower UPSes, so the devices that are on that for backup power are still on UPSes (which probably isn’t great for those UPSes if it switches on/off a lot).
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Fair 'nuff - I was thinking if this could be the case too. Seems that I need to reconsider my budget… man, moving is pretty expensive!
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I have a pair of 1500 VA APC UPS in my living room. One is for my TR Workstation, WiFi router and my NAS’s. The other is for my home lab servers, Smart TV, 10GB switch and cable box. All of our Enterprise gear and data center equipment is protected by APC as well on 8Kv monsters. (I have no affiliation with APC, beyond being one of their customers for twenty+ years.)
The cost of those units was high ( I live in Bermuda so take whatever price you would pay and add 25% minimum import duty + air shipping / handling), but they protect roughly 25K worth of assets. I’ve dealt with power spikes through my cable TV box, direct lightning strikes and sudden power losses due to hurricanes. None of my gear was affected. I did lose a UPS on the direct strike, but that was a better sacrifice than losing everything else.
Ended up going for a CyberPower CP1500EPFCLCD-UK model with a pure sine wave and 4 IEC C13 x 2 UK plugs. That will work for my needs, has a decent UI for management of the battery, and it’s 200 GBP cheaper than the next APS alternative.
Thanks for all the tips, everyone!!
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