[kwlug-disc] UPS recommendations?

[CrankyOldBugger]

While I'm no expert with picking UPS models, I can say from experience that
you need to be sure of your voltage draw per UPS device.  I had a smaller,
old UPS that I stuck under my desk a while back after I bought a nice big
new one to be my main device.  A few months later I bought one of those
little desktop coffee warmers and plugged it into a desktop power bar.
Turns out that when I turned on the coffee warmer the drain (while warming
up) was daisy chaining its way from one power bar to the next until it got
to the old UPS and set off the alarm.  Now those of you that know me know
that my hearing is pretty much shot, so I never heard the alarm, but all
the women in the house went nuts every time I tried to warm up my coffee.
It took us weeks to figure out where the noise was coming from...

Lesson learned:  the right UPS can save your family's sanity!


On Tue, 23 Jul 2024 at 10:44, Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:

> Hello all ...
>
> Had a bad experience with the UPS yesterday
> (more on that below if you are interested), but
> the result is that I now looking for a UPS to replace
> the one I had.
>
> The old one is a 1200VA APC Back-UPS that was
> over 15 years old. The battery was changed a few
> times on it.
>
> The new UPS should be 1500VA tower style, and
> able to interface with Linux in order to shut down the
> home server if minutes remaining are below some
> threshold.
>
> This one at BestBuy has good reviews.
>
>
> https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/cyberpower-1500va-ups-battery-backup-gx1500u-fc/14538697
>
> This one is considerably less, but has less outlets (not
> an issue in my use case), but is cheaper, and coupled
> with Costco's excellent return policy, it is risk free.
> The reviews (in French) mainly complain about a high
> pitch noise. Since it will go in the basement, this may
> not be noticeable.
>
>
> https://www.costco.ca/cyberpower-cst150uc-fc-battery-backup---ups-with-surge-protection.product.4000223432.html
>
> There is also this one at Staples, but the Costco one
> has the same features for less.
>
>
> https://www.staples.ca/products/3040144-en-cyberpower-1500va-10-outlet-battery-backup-ups-system-black
>
> With APC UPS's, I used the apcupsd package, and it did what
> needed to be done. About a year ago, I moved the cable from
> UPS to go from it to my OpenWRT router, and configured apcupsd
> on the router, so it can shutdown the server if the UPS has less
> than x minutes left. That way, the router and internet will remain
> available for longer in case of an outage, but not the server.
>
> I would like to continue to use something similar, e.g. NUT
> (Network UPS Tools) or even CyberPower's PowerPanel if
> it came to that.
>
> What happened is that we had a short somewhere else in the
> house that tripped a GFI circuit. I was trying to isolate where
> the issue is by testing the circuit breakers from the panel.
> When the breaker that the UPS was on was tripped, the UPS
> never came back. It said ON BATTERY instead of ON LINE. It
> was reading the voltage as 99V instead of 115V or thereabouts.
>
> The router shutdown the server, and kept the internet on as
> planned. But here is the bad part: when I rebooted the server
> the router kept getting status SHUTTING DOWN and voltage
> as 99 from the UPS, and once the server booted, it was shutdown.
> There was no time to login and see what is going on.
>
> I resorted to booting the server from Finnix on a USB key, mounting
> the root disk, doing a chroot on that mountpoint, then doing an
>
> apt purge apcupsd
>
> Finally, the server could boot again.
>
> So any thoughts welcome on UPS recommendations.
>
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