I love that the item title has “with microfiber cloth” because if you’re considering buying a $200 UPS that little extra will definitely influence your decision.
One thing that helps me picture the level of a UPS is how many outlets it has. For something simple a 4 outlet one is fine. If you got a lot of gear then 8-10 might be needed. It helps less sophisticated users asses their needs better than VAs and such.
Yeah, I’ve had one of the newer ones for a couple of years now:
and it’s been fantastic. You can connect to it and see what has gone on, as well as configure how it reacts- you can prioritize battery life (i.e. it shuts down quicker), or up-time (it shuts off at the last second), and it’ll estimate remaining life, etc…
I’ve also got a smaller (600VA) one that my TV runs off of, and it’s been just as good, although I don’t have it connected for all the neat management capabilities as it’s in the other room. With a OLED TV, I suspect it’ll run for hours before it runs out of juice, so I haven’t worried about it much.
I mostly got APC because it’s been the go-to UPS brand everywhere I’ve worked in the past (25 year IT career).
The pure sine wave output is important. It’s not just cleaner power than the square wave approximation of cheaper UPSs, but some power supplies – historically some of the Power Factor Correction (PFC) PSUs – simply will not work with the square wave outputs. They’ll just shut off. I don’t know if this is still the case with newer PFC type supplies, but sine wave output is just better, cleaner power. It may not matter for a lot of stuff, but for a high-end computer or delicate electronics, it may well matter a lot.
Side question… Why are they still using lead acid batteries? My UPS is really heavy.
Because they are cheap, the electronics for charging them have been well worked out for a long time and they don’t explode (unless you do something really stupid).
Since you aren’t likely to be lugging your UPS around much the weight aspect isn’t relevant.
Also, unlike a laptop computer or a smartphone, a UPS isn’t subject to repeated charge/discharge cycles. Mostly it just sits around waiting to be called in for service.
I use lots of UPSs, because the power at my office often goes out for a few seconds at a time.
My experience is the APC ones are the most reliable. I’m sure there are other good brands, but APC tends to have aggressive discounts on their government pricing, so I buy lots of them.
I’ve also bought Cyberpower and Amazon because of their lower price, even after the government discount. As long as the Cyberpower ones are working, they are fine, but they are very unreliable at notifying me when the battery is dead. Similar story with Amazon. It worked fine, until one day when the power went out, and I found out the battery was dead.
The APC ones are just like a smoke detector—they will start beeping at inconvenient times to let you know their battery is dead. If you’re protecting anything important, this is worth the trouble.
If you’re protecting stuff where the battery backup is merely a convenience, then getting a cheaper one might be worth the trade off of an unexpected failure in 4-5 years.
In my experience, an APC UPS in the $50-70 range will run a cable modem and WiFi for a long time; possibly hours. If you want to protect a desktop computer, then I recommend getting its own backup.
When I had my internet gear and house server, a repurposed desktop, on a single UPS, it was fine for the 2-3 second outages, but for anything that ran into minutes the computer would run the battery down to 20%, and then the computer would shutdown, leaving the cable modem running of a nearly drained battery.
Sure, I could have spent $250 on a big UPS that could run everything, but I’d rather have the server shutdown if the power is out for 5+ minutes, but have the internet stuff run for as long as possible. Two $50-70 UPSs was the answer.
Good info, thanks!
Apparently I was wrong. Power just went out for a couple of hours here in my part of Dallas, and the TV UPS (the 600VA one) was good for about 45 minutes before it shut off.
1500VA one was good for the full two hours running just the wifi router (I shut my PC down right away), and had about 35% remaining.
Only oddity of the whole thing is that despite showing the correct battery backup intervention date and time, it doesn’t register the two hour outage at all in the PowerChute software.