Laptop Powerwall 134 - Testing 48V APC UPS inverter output

[@FireballXL55]

Hi Paul your problem is voltage drop across your wimpy wires, if your wires are thinner than the UPS battery wires you will have problems, You drop 5V battery voltage at 200W load so with an 1100W load it will be a lot more, so the UPS drops out to protect what it thinks is low battery voltage. You need short battery leads i.e. 300mm or a lot thicker and for that distance you had probably 2 AWG. The fans run all the time as a UPS is only designed to run for short periods to allow a computer system to power down gracefully.

[@AveRage_Joe]

Forgot to add that I am able to turn on heat guns and heaters to max my UPS out. Plus squeeze a little extra out to 108%.😲

[@oldtimeengineer26]

Looks like your mains is being over driven by the power company. Good info

[@MikesDIYTeslaPowerwall]

At 9m:50s with the load on i see the voltage is dropping and flapping aound with 350w load. Hitting 46v. I think this is why when you try put a 1100w load the battery voltage is dropping to the UPS cut off. I think the only problem is the voltage drop on the batt causing the ups to shut off on higher loads.

[@trickyriky1]

The video i've been waiting for. So were looking at a 50% efficiency on a 200 watt load (pretty much to be expected), as the rating is for 2700, i think you need to test it with a 1350 watt load and then a 2kw load, then average the efficiency results or something. These UPS's efficiency do improve, the efficiency curve is shocking below 40% load. That heat gun will cripple any inverter(at least my assumption), it is basically a dead short with no isolation, a 1 to 1 transformer might be all you need there. Anything with isolated power supply should work off inverter / UPS. ;) Cheers paul. :)

[@The4Crawler]

My 1000W inverter/charger will run my 1180W heat gun on high although it complains about the overload and will shut off after ~30 seconds or so. But on low, it really struggles with the heat gun. If I look at the power factor, it's 0.99 on high (as you would expect from a mostly resistive load). But on low, the power factor drops to 0.69. I suspect they must have some sort of triac switching the AC on and off and that is not done in a very inverter friendly manner. I suspect the UPS is consuming a lot of power at low loads mainly to drive the big output transformer. My inverter/charge is basically like a UPS and it consumes ~40W at no load, either off the grid or off the battery.

[@MikesDIYTeslaPowerwall]

When the inverter was on mains and pulling 221w base load. Given nothing is connected to the output, is the 221w used because it is trying to charge the battery?

[@paulkennett]

Oooo. I hadn't thought of that. Maybe. I came away from this episode thinking there's a lot I'm not sure about.

[@AveRage_Joe]

Hey Paul, nice Video! Im thinking maybe the problem with the bigger load is the UPS still has the settings or is still calibrated to the old/dead bettery that was in it. Maybe try logging into it and change the external battery packs to 99 like I did and if that doesnt work then it needs to be re-calibrated with the new battery. Oh and turn off that BEEP 😉😆👍

[@paulkennett]

Oh! Good info. Thanks

[@skoto.power.systems]

Thanks for sharing 👍

[@Tiersmoke92555]

Wow, I run my apc2200va off of 21kw of Nissan G1 batteries. It handles all of my 120v loads. 2 fridges one frezzer 5 tvs microwave lights everything. But it is a pig.

[@paulkennett]

Oooo - sounds like a good setup

[@JohnDoe-nq4du]

Yea, your wall power's waveform's not perfect, but that's a cleaner waveform than I've ever seen on my own wall mains, having lived in several places in the US midwest. Utilities around here are pretty much universally horrible.

[@paulkennett]

Hah :) There's a saying here in New Zealand "We don''t know how lucky we are!" which keeps on being true. kzbin.info/www/bejne/Y2mvaaJvi89gmrc