Trendy UPSs: Their artistic management schemes and energy sources

Inside my mid-2023 teardown of a malcontent APC Again-UPS ES BE550G 550VA UPS, I wrote:

What I like about these items (and conceptually related ones from each APC and rivals) is that the batteries are user-replaceable, they usually’re standard-size and -spec. A SLA (sealed lead acid) [editor note: a correction from the original “Ni-Cd” per reader feedback] cell will sooner-or-later go kaput, whether or not it’s resulting from repeated premises energy loss dependency on it or simply prolonged trickle-charging-induced storage-capability decay, however you possibly can then simply pop in a alternative battery, and it’ll be good as new.

More and more these days, nevertheless, I’m studying that this longstanding assumption of battery standardization is sadly chucking up the sponge. Take the Amazon Fundamentals ABST600 600VA UPS that I changed the BE550G with:

I obtained it as a backup within the first place as a result of it was an Amazon Warehouse-sourced open field unit offered at a $20 low cost from the brand-new worth and ended up wanting (and dealing) like model new, too. However, though Web analysis confirmed that it was a rebranded CyberPower unit, it turned out to make use of a non-standard 12V 5Ah battery (the same situation to at least one I’d found a number of years earlier with one other in-service CyberPower UPS beneath and to my proper as I sort this). I ended up discovering one, labeled as being meant for a storage door opener (imagine it or not):

nevertheless it wasn’t simple, and Amazon/CyberPower additionally don’t make alternative simple, both. There’s no user-accessible slot dedicated to the battery; as a substitute, you might want to take your entire UPS aside, which is presumably intentional. When the battery dies a number of years down the street, they’d desire that you simply purchase a brand-new UPS as a substitute (with apparent environmental and landfill impacts).

The place else do I’ve UPSs begging for alternative? Properly, long-term readers might recall that the furnace room beneath my workplace is the house community nexus. An historical APC Again-UPS 650, the BK650MC, traditionally supplied backup energy for my QNAP TS-328 and TS-453Be NASs:

Sure, that’s a COM (serial port) for to-computer connectivity on the again panel, together with legacy POTS pass-through connectivity for surge safety functions!

I truthfully don’t know the way lengthy I’ve owned this factor, nevertheless it’s nonetheless chugging alongside (periodically fed by alternative backup batteries, in fact). Reflective of its doubtless geriatric standing, right here’s a two-part overview of it from the Ars Technica web site archive, revealed in December 1999.

The opposite UPS traditionally within the furnace room, offering backup energy for my cable modem, router and important change, was a twin of the APC Again-UPS ES BE550G that had died final 12 months:

A part of the motivation for (proactively, this time) changing it—each of them, actually—might be discovered within the final sentence of paragraph from which the sooner quote got here:

That mentioned, finally the interior circuitry itself might fail, as appears to be the case with my gadget, with the UPS then destined just for dissection-then-discard.

Extra particularly, we’ve not too long ago gone by way of a spate of brownouts and longer-duration blackouts right here. I don’t know if something particular is happening with Xcel Power of late, or if it’s simply coincidence, however provided that my spouse and I each work full-time from house, conserving the WAN and a minimum of key parts of the LAN “up” so long as potential is an enormous deal. With the 550VA UPS, broadband would sometimes drop inside round an hour. And I used to be additionally getting uninterested in speeding downstairs (inevitably in the midst of the night time, woke up by a multi-UPS beeping refrain) to stably energy off the NASs earlier than backup energy drained, doubtlessly corrupting their multi-HDD RAID arrays because of the following abrupt energy loss.

I believed I’d hit pay grime (and I truly did; hold studying) once I got here throughout APC’s BX1500M 1500VA UPS:

APC sells the BX1500M for $219.99 on its web site, though retailers reminiscent of Amazon sometimes listing the UPS for round $184. And notably, Woot! not too long ago had it for $149.99. Even higher, the retailer was providing a number of open field items for $124.87. And higher nonetheless, a one-day 10%-off promotion additional dropped the open-box worth to $112.38. I grabbed the final two. Once they arrived, one in every of them had one thing rattling round inside. Though it nonetheless appeared to work effective, I despatched it again for full refund, amongst different causes as a result of as I later realized, I solely wanted one.

All was not excellent with the BX1500M, nevertheless, a minimum of at first. Its alternative battery pack, the APCRBC124, positive seems proprietary (to not point out expensive), doesn’t it?

To not fear, it seems, as this video demonstrates:

Seems the APCRBC124 is simply two typical 12V 9Ah SLA cells linked in collection (24V end result) by a three-wire and connector-inclusive plastic bracket, together with some tape to carry the entire thing collectively. I snagged the next images from a bracket-only for-sale submit on eBay:

The setup’s fairly slick, truly. You may insert the batteries-plus-harness assemblage upside-down (with the red-color sticker “up”), which doesn’t join the battery pack to the UPS, for storage. Pull it out, flip it so the green-color sticker is “up”, put it again in and also you’re good to go.

So why didn’t I find yourself needing two UPSs? Listed here are the BX1500M-displayed stats when each NASs, plus the networking gear, are all powered up:

86W of whole energy load, 9% of the whole potential energy equipped by the battery pack, which might solely final a bit greater than an hour on battery energy alone.

Now, let’s shut down the NASs:

15W of whole load. Solely 1% of the whole potential energy equipped by the battery pack. And almost 4 hours of estimated working life on battery energy alone.

Okay, so I nonetheless have to frantically run downstairs and stably energy off the NASs every time premises energy goes down, proper? Nope. Seems each NASs run QNAP-developed and -supported implementations of the Community UPS Instruments (NUT) software program suite. I’ve obtained the TS-453Be linked to the UPS through an APC-provided USB Sort A-to-RJ50 cable and configured because the NUT server. 5 (user-configurable) minutes after premises energy goes down and the BX1500M switches to battery backup, it indicators the TS-453Be to provoke a secure shutdown sequence. And the TS-453Be-as-NUT server then additionally then sends a command to the TS-231 NUT consumer, LAN-connected over the identical (BX1500M battery-backed) GbE change, to stably shut itself down, too (static IP assignments for each NASs are clearly essential to make sure the specified consequence).

From then on, solely the LAN gear is pulling (a lot lower than earlier than) energy from the UPS. Slick, huh? By the way in which, each QNAP NASs alternatively assist one thing referred to as “auto-protection” mode, which spins down and parks the HDDs and holds the NAS in standby whereas on battery energy, auto-rebooting it when premises AC is restored. As QNAP’s documentation notes, this selection is “advisable for enterprise and enterprise customers”…which doesn’t hold the NAS’s UI from recommending that I change to it every time I log into the net browser-based UI. But it surely’s not essential in my extra modest setup, and I’ll take the additional battery life incurred by the full-shutdown different. Now I simply have to arrange related USB-cabled schemes for the opposite UPS-backed computer systems in my secure, whose O/Ss both assist UPS management natively or along with a UPS vendor-supplied utility…

Questions? Different ideas? Let me know within the feedback!

—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Imaginative and prescient Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the corporate’s on-line e-newsletter.

Associated Content material

• Placing an APC UPS out of its (and my) distress
• Standby and uninterruptible energy provide tutorial – Half 1
• Optimize uninterruptible energy in a non-traditional distributed method
• The Completely different Forms of UPS Techniques

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