Explaining Lithium, Lead Acid, Standby, Line Interactive, Online and Isolated UPS Power Systems

[@YeOldeTraveller]

I put in a whole house UPS back in 1999. The system would support 4 KVA continuous with a 10 KVA surge for about 2 minutes thermally limited. Battery was VRLA AGM with 30 KWh of capacity. Worked out to at least 3 days of emergency loads to 50% depth of discharge. I remember the calculation for WalMart in 1991. The loss they could actually demonstrate was $100K/hour. The assumption was that the real loss was much higher. They required about an hour to cleanly shut down their critical systems. If they did not get down clean, it was take a full day to recover. I had a platform I supported that would usually overheat before I exhausted the UPS for that platform.

[@Jamesaepp]

So I think one topic that wasn't discussed that a lot of us want/need to know is one of maintenance and lifetime. How do I tell if the electronics of the UPS themselves are OK? How often does a UPS need to be serviced? Yearly? Biyearly? Only when it has faults? How long should I keep a UPS in service (not considering battery replacement cycles)? How old does a UPS need to be before you would suggest replacing it out of caution for its health?

[@vgamesx1]

Aside from tearing it apart and already knowing a bit about UPSes or knowing a youtuber / somebody like Jordan you can trust, there isn't much of a way to "know" if the electronics are good, the only real giveaway that a UPS is likely low quality is if it gets rather warm, that implies a poorly made/inefficient charging circuit which means it will probably overcharge and fry the battery, I've personally experienced this where I got a couple units at a similar time, both cheap ebay batteries, the cheap consumer UPS burned up its battery in only a year or two, my good unit still has its original batteries from 5 years ago. The easiest answer I can give you is don't buy consumer garbage, most things at the $30-150 range are ok and usable but junk you can plan on replacing every 2-5 years, you want to look for at least small business grade devices in the $250+ range, for example if you're looking at APC I would probably avoid anything in the Back-UPS line unless someone knowledgeable can vouch for it, but chances are shopping for something in their Back-UPS Pro or Smart-UPS line up is probably decent.

[@Tibadude]

I replace the entire units every few years as the cost of batteries is so near the cost of a new unit why even bother replacing the batteries and I don’t trust generic aftermarket batteries bought out of Amazon. This is your average home consumer grade UPS I mean obviously you’re enterprise and rackmount ones Datacenters would not be practical to replace the entire unit After only a few years.

[@d00dEEE]

Haha, how timely, I was just thinking about resizing one of my home UPSes. We just had a power outage for 11 minutes last night and my WS/server UPS shut off just after I got all the servers down, but before I could shut down my workstation. The network stack UPS was showing 112 minutes to go when the power came back on, so no issues there.

[@CapsLock33]

you want a UPS with good head room, and with that extra head room in power. The UPS battery will last longer when there is a power outage.

[@OldePhart]

I often have to use high temp UPS like those used in Traffic cabinets or along pipelines. Often to get the 120 degree temperature requirement (normally these are at best 104 degree) I have to buy them with more runtime and more size than I want. If there are smaller ones (max 600 watt) around please someone tell me where they are. Any on else find that APC UPS have turned to crap since Schneider bought them?

[@terryjohnson3100]

Last September, I got a text at 3:30am that power was out since Midnight where I work. My UPS only provided ~2 hours of battery backup for my 3 node cluster hosting 47 virtual servers. It ended up being a wiring problem that also caused the whole site generator to fail. 2 days later when the power was restored, I was finally able to power up the cluster and check the status of the vm's. Talk about stress... New policies about contacting IT in the event of a power outage, and doubling the battery capacity helps me sleep at night.

[@eddysplosion]

This is great. Maybe a video on common templates for power and redundancy St large scale?

[@bartgrefte]

What I am missing in this video are UPS's with a DC output for devices with a DC input. Since those do not seem to exist (last time I checked anyway) I ended up diy'ing a DC UPS years ago with parts from Mini-Box (primarily known for their PicoPSU's) to power two systems with an i3 8100 (both 19V DC input) and a Raspberry Pi with the help of a DC-DC converter. The entire setup (the 3 systems + diy UPS) draws about 16W idle, compare that with my old UPS (SUA750XLI if I recall correctly) that drew about 40W on it's own while sitting there fully charged....

[@nickbenton3238]

Eltec make good dc with a range of input modules, dc/solar/ac

[@juhohartikainen4408]

There are DC UPS systems but you mostly see those in telecom environments with nominal system voltage of -48VDC. Those differ quite much from normal AC UPS.

[@Jamesaepp]

Came for the UPS info, stayed for the bromance.

[@yonatanharrison7937]

Thank you very much! Great video with important info!

[@andreilazarescu5066]

Hello Lawrence, Huge fan, great work! It will be perfect if you choose black backgrounds, it destroys my OLED.

[@sstubbby]

Containerized Mw! Been there done that. US Vet Iraq. Interesting; but not fun!

[@jamesa4958]

Great information. Thank you

[@Tibadude]

How come he not mention CyberPower brand? (Cyber Power Systems) I prefer them over APC. Had too many failures with APC. Have not seen Eaton before, looks like they are made by Tripp Lite.

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

CyberPower not too bad of a budget brand and Eaton is big in the commercial space and been around a while. They purchased Tripp Lite to get into the mid and smaller markets

[@Tibadude]

@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS CyberPower (Cyber Power Systems) also headquartered and local to me here in Minnesota. The units that are shipped to local stores as well as Amazon have shipping labels that come from a city next to me so their warehouse is also local. (Not to be confused with a different company CyberPowerPC who makes gaming pcs not UPS systems)

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

@@Tibadude CyberPower headquarter is in City of Industry, CA 91746

[@Tibadude]

@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS Cyber Power Systems not cyber power PC. Different companies. Even Wikipedia notes that. Lol. Also, actually look at store prices for the average consumer grade battery back up APC is the budget brand as they are cheaper than most cyber power units.

[@Tibadude]

@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS Cyber Power Systems is headquartered in Shakopee, MN.

[@ejbully]

I dont know how to feel at the moment. I have 4 ups inside my rack. 1 on network and security. 2 on entertainment and auto desks. 3 is dedicated for 1 pc that has dual powered system one a threadripper the other a 7980xe (boy I'm dieing to swap that power hungry chip). 4 is dedicated to a 720xd and a dl385. This is the home setup. I suffer most from voltage inconsistencies from the outlets. The ups are fairly new and do a damn good job modulating these shitty outlets. 3x trip lites and 1x EATON.

[@MadarsSmits]

Loved the video. Even though there was PowerPoint all the slides were very useful. Great high-level overview to help understand what are the main differences between different types of UPS. We have couple of APC Smart-UPS series UPS, for a few years - works great, the main disadvantage they don't have a local web interface, to monitor them you have to use APS Cloud service, witch is free and you can monitor/automatically update UPS firmware, but from a security perspective, they need an internet connection.

[@jassihra8566]

Why do UPS, use lead acid batteries as opposed to Lithium ?

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

Price and companies can be slow to engineer new systems

[@nickharvey5149]

REALLY excellent vid. Thanks both of you.

[@Tibadude]

I recently started using CyberPowers Cloud Panel for remote monitor my ups. Does not seem to have any way to send commands to the units. But I didn’t even consider the fact that having a cloud monitored would be a security concern. And it’s pretty basic of a thing and app I just mainly wanted the notifications of events While I am not at home.

[@tangofan4u]

Re. Stand-by and line interactive UPS: For how many switches between utility power and UPS power are the switching relays typically rated?

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

I don't understand your question.

[@tangofan4u]

@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS I'm assuming that - apart from the battery - the relays are the most likely point of failure. The relays on my home UPS (line interactive) sometimes switch more than a dozen times a day for brief moments, apparently to compensate for brief drops in voltage, e.g. when certain appliances start up. So the question for me is how many switches under load can these relays handle, before they die? A few hundred? A few thousand? A few ten thousand or more?

[@cts006]

@@tangofan4u Typically in the hundreds of thousands or more.

[@tangofan4u]

@@cts006 Thank you, good to know. At least I don't have to worry that my situation will lead to a regular premature death of my line-interactive UPS and I can skip the purchase of an online UPS.

[@TechySpeaking]

First

[@vk3fbab]

The thing that makes lithium dangerous is that it self oxidizes. That means it creates oxygen to fuel the fire. So you can attack it with CO2, argon, powder, sand etc and it still burns. It does this regardless of being charged or discharged. If you have a high capacity lithium battery on fire you need to use lots of water to reduce the heat. Fire departments are grappling with vehicle fires for this very reason. I'd imagine a data centre with lots of lithium storage would need to have specialised fire protection solutions and plans to handle such a fire. There was a Tesla battery fire here in Australia. Looks like the compartmentalization of batteries helped contain the fire to a small area of the facility.

[@ilseparatio2963]

Everytime I heard about milions and milions loss because of a power cut I can't understandand it. So let's say google is going down now. It means I cant check my youtube and gmail account, so no prob with that, I will come back when the power is back on. so where is the money lost ? lol

[@Tibadude]

Banks, stocks trading, online gambling … Plenty of things that use electronics in some fashion that if they go down no one can work or automated systems that are constantly transferring money around.

[@almc8445]

You're describing services that you don't pay for with cash - You pay either by ads or by data. If Google can't serve you ads, they lose out on profit. If they can't collect your data, they can't sell it and again lose out on profit. Also contributing to the large numbers lost are the knock on effects, if you break an SLA in extreme cases you may get sued, repairing the equipment that broke takes not only time but work, so you need employees on the ground and that costs money, it may even mean you need to start developing a plan to avoid similar issues in the future, which again costs money.

[@pepeshopping]

An “expert”?? A Varistor DOES NOT increase resistance with more voltage! It decreases its resistance to make a “short” and consume the surge.

[@rednecktech9485]

Correct it was a simple mistake

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

A simple mistake does not invalidate someones authority but a history of useless and pedantic comments does not make someone an authority either.