Power outage in my office, we have ES-350 Back Up Batteries but the computer still reset. Whats going on?

[Ich_bin_noob]

So in our office, all of our computers are set up with back up battery (ES-350) but during power outages or surges, a few of the computers still seem to turn off and turn back on. I thought the backup battery was supposed to keep this from happening? Does this mean the battery is dead and needs to be replaced?

Also strange is, we have a phone system but only some of the phones seem to have reset during the surge/outage. While a majority of the lines remained open, a select few lines went out and reset. Would this indicate something is wrong with the building power.

 

[middlemarkal]

350 is not very big, and you have to change the battery after a few years

 

[bignastyid]

Sounds like something you IT dept should be taking care of. With a UPS that small the system will only have a couple minutes of run time before the battery is drained, units that small are only good to condition power, and get work saved and let the system do a normal shutdown when power is lost.

 

[galeener]

Yes UPS is not meant to keep the system up indefinetly but just to give you time to save progress and power down, Or to help if you experience brown outs.

 

[InvalidError]

If some of the computers shut down, it could be a sign that the UPS is either too small to provide adequate power, that the UPS is not adequate to deal with the specific nature of whatever power problems you are having, that the UPS type is not quite compatible with the PCs' power supplies or that the PC supplies are grossly under-engineered on hold-up time.

Since you say even the phones go down, my best guess would be main factor is under-size but all of the others may still apply.

 

[unksol]

Cheap UPSs cause things to reboot sometimes. They don't produce a sine wave or really even close and some SMPS won't tolerate the switch over and reboot. That's about all there is too it.

 

[InvalidError]

Cheap UPSs cause things to reboot sometimes. They don't produce a sine wave or really even close and some SMPS won't tolerate the switch over and reboot. That's about all there is too it.

The biggest problems with UPS (aside from problems with the UPS itself) are PSUs with inadequate input filtering (you see many PSU reviews where units fail the ATX standard's 16ms hold-up time test, even high-end PSUs sometimes fail it) and APFC circuits that have trouble with the loss followed by sudden change of phase when power gets switched between line and battery. The only way to protect under-engineered PSUs like those would be double-conversion/online UPS.