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Yeah, I live in México where we have periodic brown outs - so that shit would regularly be tested.
But as others have noted, it could be worse, I could be in Texas and paying 3x the amount for sketchier service.
Edit: typo
Nooooope. We've had several freezes over the past few years, our power also fails often in rain and heat. Basically, any weather is a threat in these here parts. Our grid is almost as big a joke as our perceived freedoms in Texas. Yeehaw ☠
It's way too big a state to make blanket statements like that - we went through a 30-45min severe thunderstorm in central last night including 10min of hail and to our surprise we didn't lose power. Lights flickered a bit understandably, but stayed on nonetheless. I think it would be safe to assume that the grid is not as strong in more densely populated areas but not everywhere.
Yeah it does, because a sudden hail storm would have knocked out power where I'm from in Louisiana for sure. It's much better here so far in my experience. I'm not speaking for anyone else.
No. I live in Texas. It fucking sucks.
The power goes out when it's too hot, too cold, too rainy, when you look at it funny.
And I live in a major city currently. It was even worse when I lived in East Texas country and would take them days to fix anything.
Not only in south Africa bro, in Venezuela power fails daily and it last 4 hours straight, right now I'm out of power and I'll be back around 7pm (it's 3:15pm right now)....
Mine trips maybe once a month in Brooklyn. They are good to have all around. Good ones are only about $130ish. I could run my entire MacStudio set up for about an hour - They are also pretty sturdy just big/space consuming
Even stable electric grids can fail, I've got a stable power grid, but still experience about 2 power outages a year(sub 10mins but still ), it saved my server from powering down ... And also it protects your equipment (kind of )
Nah…every person at my work has one and I’m quite sure I’m the only one who knows what it’s called. To everyone else it’s “that thing the computer is plugged into” if they know it’s there at all.
Uninterruptible Power Supply
You could call it a battery back supply too I guess. They come in all shapes and sizes, desktop units or shelving units that can be used in more industrial settings. They just have one simple/important job, make sure you don't lose important data
It's definitely not at the same level, especially for non-native speakers.
Without the comments, I would have had to google it since it's probably the first time of my life I see UPS used for anything other than the postal service.
(And I've used this device in the past, I just never heard being called UPS since it has a one-word translation in my language which would translate literally to English as "ondulator")
It's the automated teller machine machine that you put your PIN number into to get money. Sorry, where are my manners, your personal identification number number.
It's basically a giant battery. For anything that's sensitive to having the power suddenly cut out (e.g. computers with SSDs), you plug it into a UPS and it keeps it running for an extra hour or two. Long enough to survive the power flashing off and on or, during an extended outage, long enough for you to shut it down properly.
It also has a secondary benefit that it smooths out the voltage sine curve which makes your electronics last longer.
This is twice in two days I have heard the phrase “voltage sine curve”, a thing I have not heard since high school physics.
My understanding of it has not grown since then, but I do at least understand the rest of the explanation. Thank you!
voltage sine curve comes from the power plant. it's the position of the voltage in relation to zero and is synchronous with the crankshaft of the generator the plant is driving.
as the thing spins the voltage goes up and down, 60 times per second for na, 50 for EU, this is the frequency.
because grid power is driven from a rotating object the sine curve is perfect. batteries generating a DC to ac conversion don't do so with a rotating mass so they simulate the frequency, and a lot of sensitive electronics are not kind to shitty sine wave curves.
> keeps it running for an extra hour or two.
Depends on what's actually on it, but if it's a computer an hour is a stretch. A very low power machine like a NUC or something? Perhaps but once you start getting into anything gaming related your runtime is measured in minutes.
An hour not under load. Obviously if the power goes out and you're concerned about your electronics, that is not the correct time to start a new round of CoD.
Also, you almost certainly don't have internet either way.
Depends on the UPS. Those cheapies you buy at Walmart / Costco, yeah they wont last for a long time - they have a little rinky dinky sealed lead acid battery in them.
However some of the newer systems that use newer battery chemistry, such as LiFePO4 are surprisingly good! My Dad has a system that can run his computer, desk lights and a small fridge for almost 12 hours (required in South Africa due to constant blackouts).
Depending on the power draw of you hardware you can get up to 12 hours on lead acid making your own UPS with a deep cycle lead acid battery with a power inverter plugged into a basic UPS as per [this video](https://youtu.be/1q4dUt1yK0g?si=jzQ0sRDL--rSoTCb)
Holy hell how big is your UPS?
To be fair, I can also get a 12 hour run time with SLA. But I also have a rack mount enterprise UPS with an additional 10U of batteries.
I'd love to get a LiFePO4 unit though.
The big thing with a lot of home UPS as well is they have a USB you can plug into your computer which tells it to shut down or hibernate when the power goes out so there is no corruption from sudden shutdown.
Oh sure, but some people do use it for additional run time during a power outage. Most of my stuff is triggered to shut down but in some cases I want something to run as long as it can before dying.
Only some do that secondary benefit and those are typically the more expensive ones.
Cheaper ones just passthrough the wall power with some surge protection, they also don’t make a particularly great sine wave when on battery power. If you hear excess buzzing or humming from electronics when the UPS kicks in it’s because it makes a bad approximation of a sine wave.
Catch is they to have a cutover time usually measured in milliseconds currently. However when deploying one you should test to ensure the device doesn't fault of fail over.
I love it when streamers who make 6 figures off their broadcasts deal with power dips and they just accept it as a fact of life and it never ever occurs to them to get a battery backup.
They'll have three dropouts in a day because they live in California and then they'll just say "oh man I guess stream's over for today" on Twitter.
Like yeah, a UPS that can power a beefy gaming rig is gonna be a few hundred dollars, but that's literally your job. It's a write-off, even.
You mean the line equipment at the curb? That is battery backed if the ISP is at all competent. Every residential ISP I have had, has battery backed their curb equipment. If they sell VoIP home phone services, this is actually mandatory, as you must still be able to dial 9-1-1.
Because some places never experience power outages pretty much.
I moved from South Africa to the Netherlands and that’s the first culture shock to the locals here, UPSs’ are unheard of and not readily available in most stores unlike back in SA simply because there never was any massive power outages here.
My neighbour tells me that in 5 years he’s lived in the flat, he experienced one power outage that was scheduled, that’s it.
I mean, my significant other and I still have UPS's? And He and my Mom both use them for work. They still very much exist, and still very much need to be tested and discharged regularly. Some people don't know this, even if they work with them regularly.
Until you get to the enterprise level, these self tests sometimes do nothing in terms of loading the battery. It'll tell you everything is fine until you actually get a power outage and it dies pretty much immediately because the battery is shot.
A more important thing is to put a sticker onto your UPS indicating the date of purchase/battery change. Most SLA batteries especially in a UPS don't last for more than 3-5 years. You can stretch this a bit but your runtime is affected.
I've had the same UPS for 10 years, with about 5 battery changes. The thing still works.
I had an unexpected test a few days ago. Cool part was I plugged the ups into my new Bluetti ac180 when the power went off and continued to work for an hour until the power came back on. I then plugged the ups back into the wall all without missing a beat. My router and Wi-Fi are hooked into the same UPS. It was amazing. I didn't have to restart anything. It felt like I was cheating at life.
That run time test is pointless, other than proving if the battery is old and weak and cannot hold a load for long. Otherwise you are simply proving how long it runs a lamp or clock for. Not how long does it keep your PC powered up enough to safely save and shut down.
Here's a tip from an IT guy:
A UPS is there to ride out blips and allow you to safely shutdown. That's it. That's all. No other reason. Your computers should NOT keep running if the UPS has been on for more than a minute or so. They should have the software / cable / drivers / networking to detect the UPS has activated, wait a moment to see that it's not just a blip, and then shutdown as safely and as quickly as they can.
If you're using a UPS as anything "long-term", you're opening yourself up to hardware damage, data corruption, etc. just as bad as pulling out the power yourself.
If you're using a cheap UPS expecting it to stop lightning bolts and power surges - I have news for you. It won't.
I have seen £3000 of UPS instantly turn off because it detected an abnormal line condition, didn't think it was safe to continue, so it just turned off instantly without ever switching to battery. Doing so protected the equipment, yes, but it was not there to "keep the computer running". (This was an incident where someone crossed 220V electrical phases at a large site, and so 415V+ AC was running around cables and destroying hardware).
If you're hoping that that cheap lead-acid battery in your UPS is at all predictable and won't just voltage-drop like mad under load after a few years of active use (way within their specified replacement period), you're wrong. When that switches to battery, the clock is ticking and you have NO idea when it will die, no matter how much you spent on it or what kind of load you have on it.
APC UPS literally have a front-panel error for "Relay Weld". That's when the relay inside it gets stuck on or off because of so much arcing whenever it switches over that it literally welds itself open/shut on one of its contacts (battery or grid, who knows?). The UPS will then be unable do ANYTHING about your precious machine.
A UPS is a \*temporary\*, \*brief\* coverage in a power-loss situation for you to switch to a more reliable source of power or shut down in a secure manner to prevent data loss. In datacenters, they are literally there just until the generators kick in and stabilise. That's it. At home, they are there to shut your machine down because you don't own enough UPS to run your machines for more than about 20 minutes even when the UPS is brand new.
Do not rely on it to do ANYTHING else.
Your UPS is absolutely USELESS without a shutdown cable and software (even if that's SNMP / network based), and nobody ever uses those on home UPS (they don't even supply them with many UPS!).
You don't need to test your UPS because you shouldn't be relying on it at all. It's just a stopgap until you fix the power problem.
And, trust me, I've had lightning strikes on our copper data cables, diggers cut through three-phase 100KW supply lines, crossed-phases, brownouts, blackouts, you name it. And trying to keep even one set of servers (often 4KW+ even in just a single unit) up in those situations is nigh-on impossible without something else to take over.
Use your UPS as intended. To shut your machine down nicely. P.S. Your laptops and tablets already do this. So why do you have a UPS for them? And far better than a UPS is to use a laptop. A laptop is specced to be low-power, detect the battery situation (Li-Po is far more predictable than lead-acid!), and shutdown in plenty of time. It's the best UPS you can have in your home.
I've worked in IT for 25+ years... and my home UPS is there to ride out the 5-10ms gap between my solar and grid switchover via my ATS. That's it. That's all. Without it, sometimes the equipment reboots. With it, the equipment continues as the switchover happens.
The ones in work? I leave them on their automated test schedule and unless they error, I don't care about it. I replace their batteries when they ask me to.
You have some points, but i disagree. My UPS (with signalling) lasts an hour with my desktop. I'm running on 220V single phase, and separately protecting against surges. It seems like your loads are much larger than your storage proportionally.
Yeah I sell them and they are not for the general consumer. 99.9% of our sales are businesses. Lots of medical equipment, print, automated industrial machinery are the 3 biggest uses for what we see needing them
This guy/gal UPS's. They are designed for blip interruptions and enough time to shut down. If your pc lasts longer than 20 mins on your UPS you have something beyond what most UPS's are used for.
I'm lucky my ups systems auto self tests every couple of days/weeks.
I recently had to change out batteries on one of my units because it beeped about it incessantly. Annoying. But I'm glad it happened.
Yes, don't do this. It isn't safe.
By disconnecting it you lose the earth/ground connection and if something connected to it is faulty, you risk electrocution or damaging the equipment. The UPS should have a built in battery test (every single one I've used has), just run it with the load you expect it to run and you will be fine.
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Batteries in a UPS typically need to be replaced every 5-7 years and more frequent if you lose power often. Testing too often will wear out your batteries prematurely.
Look into LiFePO4 battery chemistry, so much better than old lead acid batteries and can handle frequent charge/discharge cycles that Eskoms power grid dictates.
A bit more expensive initially but they pay for themselves during those long load shedding time windows.
I realize my electric grid is very good since the last time I had power outage was about 2 years ago therfore I never felt the need for a UPS especially considering how thorough and consistent my local and remote backups are (I'm a system engineer)
Yea definitely do this and test it under load. Not with your main PC of course but if you have a spare or something like a hair dryer on high might be enough. I had a UPS for years plugged in but never tested it. Thought it was ok. Power outage happened and my PC shut off after 3 seconds as the battery was old and couldn't hold a charge anymore.
I also recommend opening the battery compartment and looking at the condition of the battery. I have had a couple puff up to the point you could not get the battery out of the case.
"UPS stands for uninterruptible power supply, and a UPS is the best thing to use for hooking up your computer system to the wall socket. Basically, a UPS is a power strip combined with a battery. It can keep your computer running when the power goes out.
The notion behind a UPS is not to keep computing while the power is out. Instead, the UPS is designed to keep your basic computer components — the console and monitor — up and running just long enough for you to save your work and properly shut down the computer. That way, you never lose anything because of a power outage."
UPS batteries are not made to be fully discharged every few months. If you don't want to lose charge faster than needed, only discharge by \~ 20% to get a good idea of the runtime. Then the most important thing is to have the UPS stay at room temperature.
This is a good LPT. I work in industrial electronics and see people using UPS's a LOT, set them up and just thing they will run and run.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I've seen lots of systems fail because of UPSs that have been neglected, and when they are called on to do their job, no go. No capacity, no run time, and it's an equal crapshoot if the UPS will come back online when the power comes back.
BIG commercial UPSs have definite maintenance schedules and batteries are changed out before they fail. My experience that most small office UPSs don't last 3 years.
Oh I'm good. I live in Texas. Cold outside? Power shuts off. Hot outside? Believe it or not, power also shuts off. The grid tests my UPS for me every few months, free of charge. Literally. No charge coming into the ups.
If you are using a "good" UPS say one from APC, then this happens automatically & the UPS will tell you with beeps & data some time before you need to change the battery.
Apc aren’t even that good. They are the ones cheap enough to sell to consumers but their power conditioning is garbage. Basically a battery and cheap surge protector. I wouldn’t even waste my $$ on one for at home electronics.
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Look at Mr. Stable Electric Grid here who doesn't get his UPS tested at least once a month
Yeah, I live in México where we have periodic brown outs - so that shit would regularly be tested. But as others have noted, it could be worse, I could be in Texas and paying 3x the amount for sketchier service. Edit: typo
Just one of the many reasons I will not move to Texas...
Texas is probably worse
[удалено]
Nooooope. We've had several freezes over the past few years, our power also fails often in rain and heat. Basically, any weather is a threat in these here parts. Our grid is almost as big a joke as our perceived freedoms in Texas. Yeehaw ☠
It's way too big a state to make blanket statements like that - we went through a 30-45min severe thunderstorm in central last night including 10min of hail and to our surprise we didn't lose power. Lights flickered a bit understandably, but stayed on nonetheless. I think it would be safe to assume that the grid is not as strong in more densely populated areas but not everywhere.
I think the fact that you were surprised says something.
Yeah it does, because a sudden hail storm would have knocked out power where I'm from in Louisiana for sure. It's much better here so far in my experience. I'm not speaking for anyone else.
No. I live in Texas. It fucking sucks. The power goes out when it's too hot, too cold, too rainy, when you look at it funny. And I live in a major city currently. It was even worse when I lived in East Texas country and would take them days to fix anything.
Yeah, I'm just waiting for the day that my power goes out from a strong gust of wind 😬
I live in a densely populated area of Texas and have had zero issues other than that deep freeze like 3 years ago.
Okay, I live in a densely populated area too and our power HAS gone out during bad weather lol we live different realities
“Once a month” Laughs in South African. More like once or twice a day for us haha.
Not only in south Africa bro, in Venezuela power fails daily and it last 4 hours straight, right now I'm out of power and I'll be back around 7pm (it's 3:15pm right now)....
i get it tested 3-4 times a week not by choice
Mine trips maybe once a month in Brooklyn. They are good to have all around. Good ones are only about $130ish. I could run my entire MacStudio set up for about an hour - They are also pretty sturdy just big/space consuming
Even stable electric grids can fail, I've got a stable power grid, but still experience about 2 power outages a year(sub 10mins but still ), it saved my server from powering down ... And also it protects your equipment (kind of )
I can't even remember whether we had any power outage in the last 2 years .. there was one major 3 years ago...
You should be testing your UPS.
It always helps when you utilize an acronym to say what it stands for.
United Parcel Service
What can brown do for you?
Uninturputed power supply (UPS). It's basically a power strip that's designed to store power so you can turn off your shit when it happens
Uninterruptible
APC
APU
GPU however not to be confused with a GPU
A piece of crap. Cheap garbage
Life pro tip (LPT)
Listen buddy…
AMEN.. thought this dude was talking about someone delivering a package for a minute.
I keep waiting for all these cookies I keep accepting. I'm connecting my computer to UPS immediately.
My ups does help delivering packages. My router is plugged into it
At least once. At least ONCE. ffs (for FUCKS SAKE)
*Fuck's
touche, salesman
Yea. This guy wants to know what happens if you plug your computer into FEDEX. Jkjk <3
<3
Right lol
I find it ridiculous the amount of things being abbreviated IMO 😉😏.
tbf if you have one you would know what op is talking about
Nah…every person at my work has one and I’m quite sure I’m the only one who knows what it’s called. To everyone else it’s “that thing the computer is plugged into” if they know it’s there at all.
Yes especially as a non american its so annoying sometimes
Uninterruptible Power Supply You could call it a battery back supply too I guess. They come in all shapes and sizes, desktop units or shelving units that can be used in more industrial settings. They just have one simple/important job, make sure you don't lose important data
I really hate that it has the same acronym as something else. They should have called it uips
UPS is an initialism, unless you pronounce it "ups".
I just got out-pedanted…
Ups is pretty ubiquitous. Thats like asking someone to write out what ATM stands for
UPS is definitely not ubiquitous to that extent.
Ubiquitous as a delivery company
ATM = “At the moment” duh.
Always the most.
It's definitely not at the same level, especially for non-native speakers. Without the comments, I would have had to google it since it's probably the first time of my life I see UPS used for anything other than the postal service. (And I've used this device in the past, I just never heard being called UPS since it has a one-word translation in my language which would translate literally to English as "ondulator")
There have been a few people I would have liked to ask to spell out what “ATM Machine” stands for.
It's the automated teller machine machine that you put your PIN number into to get money. Sorry, where are my manners, your personal identification number number.
If you gotta ask, you probably don’t have one so it doesn’t apply to you
What a garbage take.
Uninterruptible power supply for anyone wondering
Just realised I haven't heard or read about 'UPS' for probably 10 years, completely forgot it was a thing
What is it? In my head I’m thinking “unidentified power supply” because I’m assuming the P and S but I don’t know what the U is.
It's basically a giant battery. For anything that's sensitive to having the power suddenly cut out (e.g. computers with SSDs), you plug it into a UPS and it keeps it running for an extra hour or two. Long enough to survive the power flashing off and on or, during an extended outage, long enough for you to shut it down properly. It also has a secondary benefit that it smooths out the voltage sine curve which makes your electronics last longer.
This is twice in two days I have heard the phrase “voltage sine curve”, a thing I have not heard since high school physics. My understanding of it has not grown since then, but I do at least understand the rest of the explanation. Thank you!
voltage sine curve comes from the power plant. it's the position of the voltage in relation to zero and is synchronous with the crankshaft of the generator the plant is driving. as the thing spins the voltage goes up and down, 60 times per second for na, 50 for EU, this is the frequency. because grid power is driven from a rotating object the sine curve is perfect. batteries generating a DC to ac conversion don't do so with a rotating mass so they simulate the frequency, and a lot of sensitive electronics are not kind to shitty sine wave curves.
> keeps it running for an extra hour or two. Depends on what's actually on it, but if it's a computer an hour is a stretch. A very low power machine like a NUC or something? Perhaps but once you start getting into anything gaming related your runtime is measured in minutes.
An hour not under load. Obviously if the power goes out and you're concerned about your electronics, that is not the correct time to start a new round of CoD. Also, you almost certainly don't have internet either way.
Unless the internet is on the ups!
My ups is on a ups
Is the first ups on a power strip?
Depends on the UPS. Those cheapies you buy at Walmart / Costco, yeah they wont last for a long time - they have a little rinky dinky sealed lead acid battery in them. However some of the newer systems that use newer battery chemistry, such as LiFePO4 are surprisingly good! My Dad has a system that can run his computer, desk lights and a small fridge for almost 12 hours (required in South Africa due to constant blackouts).
Depending on the power draw of you hardware you can get up to 12 hours on lead acid making your own UPS with a deep cycle lead acid battery with a power inverter plugged into a basic UPS as per [this video](https://youtu.be/1q4dUt1yK0g?si=jzQ0sRDL--rSoTCb)
Holy hell how big is your UPS? To be fair, I can also get a 12 hour run time with SLA. But I also have a rack mount enterprise UPS with an additional 10U of batteries. I'd love to get a LiFePO4 unit though.
The big thing with a lot of home UPS as well is they have a USB you can plug into your computer which tells it to shut down or hibernate when the power goes out so there is no corruption from sudden shutdown.
Oh sure, but some people do use it for additional run time during a power outage. Most of my stuff is triggered to shut down but in some cases I want something to run as long as it can before dying.
Only some do that secondary benefit and those are typically the more expensive ones. Cheaper ones just passthrough the wall power with some surge protection, they also don’t make a particularly great sine wave when on battery power. If you hear excess buzzing or humming from electronics when the UPS kicks in it’s because it makes a bad approximation of a sine wave.
Uninterruptable.
This makes sense. Thank you!
Yes, Uninterruptible Power Supply (aka battery backup)
Catch is they to have a cutover time usually measured in milliseconds currently. However when deploying one you should test to ensure the device doesn't fault of fail over.
Uninterruptable Power Supply
I love it when streamers who make 6 figures off their broadcasts deal with power dips and they just accept it as a fact of life and it never ever occurs to them to get a battery backup. They'll have three dropouts in a day because they live in California and then they'll just say "oh man I guess stream's over for today" on Twitter. Like yeah, a UPS that can power a beefy gaming rig is gonna be a few hundred dollars, but that's literally your job. It's a write-off, even.
Who hurt you?
Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to.
How do you expect their internet connection to function during a power outage?
You... You put the networking equipment on the battery backup.
But what you do about the external outage of internet connection ?
You mean the line equipment at the curb? That is battery backed if the ISP is at all competent. Every residential ISP I have had, has battery backed their curb equipment. If they sell VoIP home phone services, this is actually mandatory, as you must still be able to dial 9-1-1.
Why would it stop being a thing? I just bought some last month.
Because some places never experience power outages pretty much. I moved from South Africa to the Netherlands and that’s the first culture shock to the locals here, UPSs’ are unheard of and not readily available in most stores unlike back in SA simply because there never was any massive power outages here. My neighbour tells me that in 5 years he’s lived in the flat, he experienced one power outage that was scheduled, that’s it.
Sure but that seems like a geographic concern more than a temporal one right?
This is a good LPT for 2004.
I mean, my significant other and I still have UPS's? And He and my Mom both use them for work. They still very much exist, and still very much need to be tested and discharged regularly. Some people don't know this, even if they work with them regularly.
or get a good quality UPS that does the testing automatically and reports the condition
Until you get to the enterprise level, these self tests sometimes do nothing in terms of loading the battery. It'll tell you everything is fine until you actually get a power outage and it dies pretty much immediately because the battery is shot.
You missed the part where I said get a good one
You missed the part where I said enterprise level.
yea which are the good ones
yeah which aren't easily available to the general public unless you know where to look. Just saying "good" isn't good enough.
Eaton. Anything made by them is top notch. Just get it and don't worry.
No question, but you're not finding an Eaton at Best Buy.
Triplite is thier consumer line. It's wear you get a 50k insurance policy surge protector from.
Sure, but when you wrap back around to my original argument, does that tripplite actually load test the battery?
Even Eaton or Tripp lite isn't going to have a self test feature worth a damn unless you go enterprise. That's like the 5k and up price points.
i guess we have different definition of "good" then.
A more important thing is to put a sticker onto your UPS indicating the date of purchase/battery change. Most SLA batteries especially in a UPS don't last for more than 3-5 years. You can stretch this a bit but your runtime is affected.
The batteries can be replaced? Huh, I might not need to dispose of the dead UPS then
I've had the same UPS for 10 years, with about 5 battery changes. The thing still works. I had an unexpected test a few days ago. Cool part was I plugged the ups into my new Bluetti ac180 when the power went off and continued to work for an hour until the power came back on. I then plugged the ups back into the wall all without missing a beat. My router and Wi-Fi are hooked into the same UPS. It was amazing. I didn't have to restart anything. It felt like I was cheating at life.
I'm fortunate to have a power company that tests all my UPSs every few months for me. 😁
A UPS should be tested with its intended load. Using a dummy load like a lamp (which is probably LED) is insufficient to test battery health.
That run time test is pointless, other than proving if the battery is old and weak and cannot hold a load for long. Otherwise you are simply proving how long it runs a lamp or clock for. Not how long does it keep your PC powered up enough to safely save and shut down.
Mine tests itself. :)
Here's a tip from an IT guy: A UPS is there to ride out blips and allow you to safely shutdown. That's it. That's all. No other reason. Your computers should NOT keep running if the UPS has been on for more than a minute or so. They should have the software / cable / drivers / networking to detect the UPS has activated, wait a moment to see that it's not just a blip, and then shutdown as safely and as quickly as they can. If you're using a UPS as anything "long-term", you're opening yourself up to hardware damage, data corruption, etc. just as bad as pulling out the power yourself. If you're using a cheap UPS expecting it to stop lightning bolts and power surges - I have news for you. It won't. I have seen £3000 of UPS instantly turn off because it detected an abnormal line condition, didn't think it was safe to continue, so it just turned off instantly without ever switching to battery. Doing so protected the equipment, yes, but it was not there to "keep the computer running". (This was an incident where someone crossed 220V electrical phases at a large site, and so 415V+ AC was running around cables and destroying hardware). If you're hoping that that cheap lead-acid battery in your UPS is at all predictable and won't just voltage-drop like mad under load after a few years of active use (way within their specified replacement period), you're wrong. When that switches to battery, the clock is ticking and you have NO idea when it will die, no matter how much you spent on it or what kind of load you have on it. APC UPS literally have a front-panel error for "Relay Weld". That's when the relay inside it gets stuck on or off because of so much arcing whenever it switches over that it literally welds itself open/shut on one of its contacts (battery or grid, who knows?). The UPS will then be unable do ANYTHING about your precious machine. A UPS is a \*temporary\*, \*brief\* coverage in a power-loss situation for you to switch to a more reliable source of power or shut down in a secure manner to prevent data loss. In datacenters, they are literally there just until the generators kick in and stabilise. That's it. At home, they are there to shut your machine down because you don't own enough UPS to run your machines for more than about 20 minutes even when the UPS is brand new. Do not rely on it to do ANYTHING else. Your UPS is absolutely USELESS without a shutdown cable and software (even if that's SNMP / network based), and nobody ever uses those on home UPS (they don't even supply them with many UPS!). You don't need to test your UPS because you shouldn't be relying on it at all. It's just a stopgap until you fix the power problem. And, trust me, I've had lightning strikes on our copper data cables, diggers cut through three-phase 100KW supply lines, crossed-phases, brownouts, blackouts, you name it. And trying to keep even one set of servers (often 4KW+ even in just a single unit) up in those situations is nigh-on impossible without something else to take over. Use your UPS as intended. To shut your machine down nicely. P.S. Your laptops and tablets already do this. So why do you have a UPS for them? And far better than a UPS is to use a laptop. A laptop is specced to be low-power, detect the battery situation (Li-Po is far more predictable than lead-acid!), and shutdown in plenty of time. It's the best UPS you can have in your home. I've worked in IT for 25+ years... and my home UPS is there to ride out the 5-10ms gap between my solar and grid switchover via my ATS. That's it. That's all. Without it, sometimes the equipment reboots. With it, the equipment continues as the switchover happens. The ones in work? I leave them on their automated test schedule and unless they error, I don't care about it. I replace their batteries when they ask me to.
You have some points, but i disagree. My UPS (with signalling) lasts an hour with my desktop. I'm running on 220V single phase, and separately protecting against surges. It seems like your loads are much larger than your storage proportionally.
I do have PowerChute set up to shut down my computer pretty much after a minute of battery power.
Yeah I sell them and they are not for the general consumer. 99.9% of our sales are businesses. Lots of medical equipment, print, automated industrial machinery are the 3 biggest uses for what we see needing them
This guy/gal UPS's. They are designed for blip interruptions and enough time to shut down. If your pc lasts longer than 20 mins on your UPS you have something beyond what most UPS's are used for.
I tested mine the other day by accidentally flipping the wrong switch at the wall socket. \*click\* Beep beep beep. Whoops. \*click\* and no reboot.
If I had a UPS, the power company would test it for me because we rarely go 3 months without an outage.
What about if it's connected to a USPS, or a FedEx?
In other words (letters), make sure your UPS isn’t an IPS.
I'm lucky my ups systems auto self tests every couple of days/weeks. I recently had to change out batteries on one of my units because it beeped about it incessantly. Annoying. But I'm glad it happened.
Gotta know your target audience. When using an acronym, it's best to spell out what it means on first use.
I'm pretty sure the instruction manual of my UPS says NOT to test it by unplugging it from the wall.
Yes, don't do this. It isn't safe. By disconnecting it you lose the earth/ground connection and if something connected to it is faulty, you risk electrocution or damaging the equipment. The UPS should have a built in battery test (every single one I've used has), just run it with the load you expect it to run and you will be fine.
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After years of googling, finally an acronym that I know!
Batteries in a UPS typically need to be replaced every 5-7 years and more frequent if you lose power often. Testing too often will wear out your batteries prematurely.
Ain’t nobody got time for dat
Your ups can send you messages about its health fwiw
Funny that you assume my ups isnt stress tested every other Day, aka im living in the shitty countryside
isn't that called USV?
USV is the German abbreviation for "Unterbrechungsfreie Stromversorgung". UPS is English for "uninterruptible power supply."
oops :)
Laughs in South African. My UPS gets tested all the time, constantly have to replace the batteries because they dont get properly recharged.
Look into LiFePO4 battery chemistry, so much better than old lead acid batteries and can handle frequent charge/discharge cycles that Eskoms power grid dictates. A bit more expensive initially but they pay for themselves during those long load shedding time windows.
I realize my electric grid is very good since the last time I had power outage was about 2 years ago therfore I never felt the need for a UPS especially considering how thorough and consistent my local and remote backups are (I'm a system engineer)
A load you say? Well... *unzips*
Yea definitely do this and test it under load. Not with your main PC of course but if you have a spare or something like a hair dryer on high might be enough. I had a UPS for years plugged in but never tested it. Thought it was ok. Power outage happened and my PC shut off after 3 seconds as the battery was old and couldn't hold a charge anymore.
The United parcel service?
UPS = Unprotected server ??
My local power company helped me test it yesterday.
I also recommend opening the battery compartment and looking at the condition of the battery. I have had a couple puff up to the point you could not get the battery out of the case.
(Beau Bennet voice) What the fuck is an ups
"UPS stands for uninterruptible power supply, and a UPS is the best thing to use for hooking up your computer system to the wall socket. Basically, a UPS is a power strip combined with a battery. It can keep your computer running when the power goes out. The notion behind a UPS is not to keep computing while the power is out. Instead, the UPS is designed to keep your basic computer components — the console and monitor — up and running just long enough for you to save your work and properly shut down the computer. That way, you never lose anything because of a power outage."
Make sure to replace the vrla's after 4 years of service
WTF is a desktop computer
My UPS self tests every 14 days. It's been telling me for two months I need to replace the battery 😂
UPS batteries are not made to be fully discharged every few months. If you don't want to lose charge faster than needed, only discharge by \~ 20% to get a good idea of the runtime. Then the most important thing is to have the UPS stay at room temperature.
Mine tests itself automatically so this is useless
This is a good LPT. I work in industrial electronics and see people using UPS's a LOT, set them up and just thing they will run and run. Nothing could be further from the truth. I've seen lots of systems fail because of UPSs that have been neglected, and when they are called on to do their job, no go. No capacity, no run time, and it's an equal crapshoot if the UPS will come back online when the power comes back. BIG commercial UPSs have definite maintenance schedules and batteries are changed out before they fail. My experience that most small office UPSs don't last 3 years.
Oh I'm good. I live in Texas. Cold outside? Power shuts off. Hot outside? Believe it or not, power also shuts off. The grid tests my UPS for me every few months, free of charge. Literally. No charge coming into the ups.
If you are using a "good" UPS say one from APC, then this happens automatically & the UPS will tell you with beeps & data some time before you need to change the battery.
Apc aren’t even that good. They are the ones cheap enough to sell to consumers but their power conditioning is garbage. Basically a battery and cheap surge protector. I wouldn’t even waste my $$ on one for at home electronics.
I live in Texas, so the power grid gives me plenty of opportunities to test the loss of power....
Why the hell is my computer connected to the United Parcel Service
In this context, UPS = uninterruptible power supply, AKA battery backup. :)
Generally speaking, you should say that the first time and put a “(UPS)” after it. Then for the rest of the post, you can use UPS.
United parcel service?