Question Advice on purchasing a UPS ?

[Drone4four]

Greetings!

My new home and local neighborhood has been expericing brown outs every few weeks. The power for my whole home will flicker off /on for a few seconds. It's not a big deal but the fleetingly temporary brown out is enough to power cycle my Linux PC and interrupt my workflow So in the interests of best practices I figure getting a battery-surge protector combo would be a good investment.

• Here is my PSU model: GIGABYTE GP-P650B "650 Watts" 80 PLUS Bronze Certified Power Supply (GP-P650B)
• I have an LG "38WK95C-W" monitor ("60 Watts") . Full specs: https://www.lg.com/ca_en/monitors/ultrawide/38wk95c-w/
• Not sure about my modem

I believe those are the only 3 electrical devices that require protection.

I am considering these two Uninterruptable Power Supply Systems:

• CyberPower CP1500AVRLCD3 Intelligent LCD UPS System, 1500VA/900W, 12 Outlets, 2 USB Ports, AVR, Mini Tower, Black
• Amazon Basics Line-Interactive UPS 1500VA 900 Watt Surge Protector Battery Power Backup, 10 Outlets - Black

Here are my questions:

1. They are both 900 Watts. That is greater than my power requirements. But the only other options I could see on Amazon were 600 Watts which is less than my PC PSU.
2. What does "1500VA" mean? That seems to be an important characteristic of these UPS Systems and I am not sure where my hardware fits in with this requirement
3. The first one says it should last "8 hours" which leads me to think this is wayyyy overkill becasue my power goes out for just a few seconds. I don't need a battery to last for hours.
4. What other factors would you people suggest I consider?

 

[Drone4four]

To correct myself, there is a chart comparing different UPS characteristics. It says charge = 8 hours. But "Run Time" ranges from 10-12 minutes. Is that really how long to expect the full charge to last?

 

[Corwin65]

UPS is there to allow you to save and power down.

 

[geofelt]

Go to the apc web site.
They will have a calculator app to size a ups.

 

[Ralston18]

And, as I understand the working environment, UPS or not be sure to have a good backup routine in place.

 

[slurmsmckenzie]

In case it is a helpful example I'm using an APC Back-UPS RS 900MI which is 900VA / 540W and I have the following plugged into it:

Desktop PC with Ryzen 5950X & 4070 Ti (1000W PSU)
LG OLED monitor
Netgear Readynas 202
Zyxel 2.5gb network switch

When I'm just browsing my APC tells me I am using 140W of power and if power was lost it would last approximately 24 mins - as others have said this is pretty much just time to shut everything off cleanly. Of course if there was a momentary brown-out then it would cope with that just fine.

Just fired up Forza Horizon 4 and during game play my usage went up to 240W and it indicated 13 minutes of time if the power was lost. Even though I have a 1000W PSU (which is way OTT I admit) my 540W UPS does me fine. From my perspective your UPS does not need to exceed the W rating of your PC PSU.

Obviously the amount of power that you'll be drawing at any one time depends on your system and what you're doing, if there was a way to figure that out it would help. As well as the APC software I've also used HWINFO in the past - I used to have a USB link to my PSU which made it really simple.

The only other thing I'd add is that some people say that you should have a pure sine-wave capable UPS, I don't and have never noticed an issue but YMMV!

 

[Eximo]

If you want longer term power for outages, that is a different question at much greater expense.

And yes, batteries in UPS are slowly charged, so they can't handle outages in rapid succession.

If you are comfortable with electronics, lead acid UPS can be easily modified to use larger external batteries, of course those can be quite expensive.

Another cheap way to get larger amounts of stored power is to buy old data center/rack UPS and do the same thing.

 

[Paperdoc]

The "1500 VA" spec is important to electricians, but for regular users the WATTS spec is more useful. These units have ratings of 900 W. That is the MAX power rate they can deliver when your mains supply fails.

Now, the real thing to watch is for HOW LONG? For the Cyberpower unit its website claims it can deliver power at HALF that rate (450 W) for up to 12 minutes, and at FULL 900 W rate for up to THREE minutes. That's all you can get from units like this. This underscores the statement that the correct way to use such a device is to act immediately to stop all use and shut down your system in an orderly fashion BEFORE the backup power fails! Of course, this presumes that someone WILL be right there to recognize the main power failure and take these shut-down actions right away. If the system is running unattended, shut-down is unlikely to be done in time!

OP, you state you are concerned with short-term sags of power you call Brownouts. So IF you can be sure you (or someone else suitably prepared) will always be there when power sags AND you are confident that the interruption WILL be brief, you can delay your shut-down process for a few minutes and hope the interruption really IS short. During that time this UPS will keep your system running smoothly. If it takes too long (3 min? 10 min?) you MUST proceed with smooth shut-down. Do not ever depend on having your system keep running for a long time.

Edited to add:
IMPORTANT Note on runtime. Those specs by the maker apply to a NEW unit with fresh batteries. The batteries on such units do degrade slowly over time so they don't hold as much charge as new ones. It is common to find that older ones are able to supply power for much shorter times than when new after 3 to 5 years, and then they need to be replaced. Commonly each UPS will contain only one battery, but there is not single common type and you need to get the correct replacement unit.

We have a couple of UPS units in our home network system. Each powers only a couple of small devices (routers and the interface box for the fibre optic connection to our telecom supplier) that draw less than 50W, so their runtime on power system failure is hours. The entire network is not working (servers, etc.), but WiFi (via the routers) and internet access is available to battery-powered laptops, cell phones and tablets.

 

[Drone4four]

Hi folks - -

And, as I understand the working environment, UPS or not be sure to have a good backup routine in place.

As the old adage goes: "Computer users fall into two groups. Those who do backups and those who have never had a hard drive fail." That is a quote I fondly remember from a veteran Gentoo user's message board signature way back from 2003. Modern computers don't have hard drives. We have SSDs which aren't as prone to failure. In any case and in this situation we're dealing with power outages which cause my PC to reboot but the same principal holds - - my precious personal data on my storage drive is backed up onto my Dropbox. My local storage mirrors what is in the cloud. Other content I work on in Google Docs which autosaves. And my local web development work is auto saved as well and also mirrors my remote repositories on GitHub. All my data is backed up. The only 'loss' is the way I have my dozens of virtual workspaces on Gnome and the way I have meticulously arranged my web browser windows. It's an inconvenience to reconfigure everything but I can rest assured that all my data is backed up and I don't really lose anything valuable.

If you want longer term power for outages, that is a different question at much greater expense.
And yes, batteries in UPS are slowly charged, so they can't handle outages in rapid succession.

In my case it goes out for a few seconds. This is the problem I am trying to solve.

OP, you state you are concerned with short-term sags of power you call Brownouts. So IF you can be sure you (or someone else suitably prepared) will always be there when power sags AND you are confident that the interruption WILL be brief, you can delay your shut-down process for a few minutes and hope the interruption really IS short. During that time this UPS will keep your system running smoothly. If it takes too long (3 min? 10 min?) you MUST proceed with smooth shut-down. Do not ever depend on having your system keep running for a long time.

Noted.

As many of you have pointed out, these UPS batteries I am considering buying are only expected to last ~3 to 10 minutes. This meets my primary requirement which is to withstand a few seconds of a brown out. Since the pandemic up to today and for the forseeable future, my work arrangements enable me to work from home. So if the power goes out for a few seconds, my lights around me will flicker on/off so I will know the brown out is happening but my PC will continue to hum along uninterrupted. If the power goes out for a slightly longer period, I can easily toggle from my laptop to my PC and power down my system within less than 1 minute. So I think I am covered.

I decided to go with the CyberPower model. I ordered it on Amazon yesterday and will be delivered to my home later today.

Thank you all for answering my questions.

 

[bill001g]

I did not see this thread before you ordered.

A key consideration on newer computer power supplies and UPS is the difference between true sine wave and simulated sine wave. Modern power supplies to get their high efficiency require very clean power...ie good sine wave with low harmonic distortion. If they do not get clean input power they tend to not deliver their rated outputs and have much more energy wasted to heat.

This is more a issue if you were to run a computer on a generator that is not true sign wave..ie a non inverter generator. Poor power can cause damage to the power supply. When you run on UPS you are not running for a long period of time and most times you are not running anywhere near the rated power draw of the power supply.
On even cheaper UPS or more those power inverters you run on a car battery I have seen computer power supplies immediately turn off when they detected poor power inputs. These put out square wave rather than simulated sign wave which is even worse.

In general you really want a true sign wave UPS for a computer..or even a tv or other higher end electronics. Not likely going to make much difference but I would test as soon as you get the UPS. Let it charge and then uplug it and make sure your computer does not have any issue running on battery power. You should be able to return the UPS if your computer is overly sensitive.