Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Computers & Peripherals => Topic started by: Ellis Vener on December 24, 2013, 12:39:35 pm
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Just had an older (circa 2005) APC Back-UPS XS 1000 UPS unit die on me. It's probably the battery but does anyone have positive or negative recommendations for a replacement unit?
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I went on Amazon and found a replacement battery for about $10.00 when my UPS (ES500) quit. Been fine for well over a year now.
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I have stuck with the APC brand units for 10+ years and still love them! What in the world do you need that much wattage for though?
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I have stuck with the APC brand units for 10+ years and still love them! What in the world do you need that much wattage for though?
Hi,
May be very useful when in the middle of a large format print job ...
'Almost finished' prints are expensive to redo, wasting a full page with ink.
I also found out the hard way that my prior APC unit didn't switch fast enough for my Dell workstation. I got an AEG unit instead, it had no trouble taking over and allowing a graceful shut-down when I tested it by pulling the equipment power plug form the wall-socket.
Cheers,
Bart
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Ours are continually tested, we have a HORRIBLE grid here with all the lightning. At my last office it was almost a guarantee that every Monday afternoon meant a 30-60 min power outage lol! I have used dozens and dozens of APCs, never had a switching issue, maybe you got a dud or it was just too small...either way I have personally used and setup 40+ of them with great results, don't be worried about it! You should use a Kill-a-watt during a print run, you might be surprised how little power it's using and how long the normal sized units will go for.
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Ours are continually tested, we have a HORRIBLE grid here with all the lightning. At my last office it was almost a guarantee that every Monday afternoon meant a 30-60 min power outage lol! I have used dozens and dozens of APCs, never had a switching issue, maybe you got a dud or it was just too small...either way I have personally used and setup 40+ of them with great results, don't be worried about it! You should use a Kill-a-watt during a print run, you might be surprised how little power it's using and how long the normal sized units will go for.
Transients caused by lightning and the electrical grid interacting was a horrible problem when I lived in Tampa (2004-early '06) . I suspect it was an issue with the problem Kelby had with his Drobo units. An electrical engineer in my old neighborhood recommended getting much heavier duty non-consumer grade UPS/surge protectors and I've stuck with that policy since then
Basically I want enough capacity for everything to power down gracefully.
I went with a 1300 watt APC UPS /surge protector this afternoon.
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I would love a whole house unit if they weren't so out of my budget lol
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I would love a whole house unit if they weren't so out of my budget lol
Check your local power company. Here in NC, I have a whole house surge protection which cost about $7 a month. Reduces the demand on in house surge and UPS units.
John
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Surge protection is apples and oranges to UPC - house battery units are thousands!
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It's $7/mos here too for the useless surge crap (false security) : https://www.progress-energy.com/florida/home/products-services/surge-protection/index.page (https://www.progress-energy.com/florida/home/products-services/surge-protection/index.page)
This is what you need to get rid of all the battery backups: http://www.wholesalesolar.com/backup/4400-watt-home-battery-backup-system.html (http://www.wholesalesolar.com/backup/4400-watt-home-battery-backup-system.html)
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It's $7/mos here too for the useless surge crap (false security) : https://www.progress-energy.com/florida/home/products-services/surge-protection/index.page (https://www.progress-energy.com/florida/home/products-services/surge-protection/index.page)
This is what you need to get rid of all the battery backups: http://www.wholesalesolar.com/backup/4400-watt-home-battery-backup-system.html (http://www.wholesalesolar.com/backup/4400-watt-home-battery-backup-system.html)
I don't think I or Progress Energy says that the $7 solution avoided the need for in house surge or UPS units.
Are you saying or implying that the whole house surge has NO value?
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I've used APC for a couple decades. They're a good company, but pricey. For this reason I've been using their outlet products for as long as I can remember. You can save a lot using their Outlet. (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001R97XFS/ref=wms_ohs_product?ie=UTF8&psc=1)
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Hi,
I have been using a PowerSource 400 that is enough to support my iMAC my Drobo, my external disk array (WD) and the ADSL modem for about 3 to 6h depending on the load.
Since I bough it on 2008 it lose about an hour of capacity.
Xantrex no longer make this units Duracell and others sale the similar product with higher load :
but http://www.duracellpower.com/backup-power/uninterrupted-power/powersource-1800.aspx
You can see multiple options in Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Duracell-852-1807-Outlet-Rechargeable-Source/dp/B000S0VFTM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1388070599&sr=8-1&keywords=powersource+1800
I am not sure about the tolerances that your equipment have, but in my case the powersource 400 has been, to me, free of any hassle. I want to underscore that I have not use the high capacity, Duracell branded one.
Best regards,
J. Duncan
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Transients caused by lightning and the electrical grid interacting was a horrible problem when I lived in Tampa (2004-early '06) . I suspect it was an issue with the problem Kelby had with his Drobo units. An electrical engineer in my old neighborhood recommended getting much heavier duty non-consumer grade UPS/surge protectors and I've stuck with that policy since then
Basically I want enough capacity for everything to power down gracefully.
I went with a 1300 watt APC UPS /surge protector this afternoon.
Tampa literally means "light stick" ---a native American moniker. I live 35 miles east of Tampa, in Polk County. My house is on a man-made hill as the county was at one time the largest phosphate mining site in the world. After the phosphate was separated form the sandy dirt, the dirt was piled and compacted to make a big hill. Orange groves flourished for about 60 years after the phosphate was mined. Then the groves gave way to housing developments. At 140 feet above sea level our home is located on one of the highest places in the county. I'm not worried about rising sea levels. But I will attest that the lightning situation in this part of the hemisphere is beyond horrible. During the rainy season, 5 months out of the year, there is a thunder storm virtually every day. Our property (2/3 acre) gets at least one lightning hit a season. In 2009, a lighting bolt touched ground about four feet from our house. Our neighbors saw the flash and heard the boom. The lightning made contact with the TV coax cable buried a few inches below the surface of the ground. The cable leads into our our house. Once the plasma entered through the cable into our house, it traversed the entire the length until it reached ground outside. I wasn't home, but my wife and dog were. Our 45 pound dog jumped into my wife's arms My wife's hair and the dog's fur stood on end. They felt the plasma coursing through the house. I pulled into the driveway only moments after the strike. I walked into the house and just about every electronic device, appliances, radio, whatever either got fried or half-fried. Buzzers buzzing, alarms going off, the TV turned itself on with volume full blast, and all of the UPS backups were chirping away. Eerie. In my office, I lost both printers--a 24" and a 44" Epson. My production computer, laptop, scanner, etc, all plugged into UPS backups, got toasted. Some devices such as external hard drives that were not even plugged into an outlet got messed up. The power cords lying on the floor acted as antennae and picked up the plasma. All told, between the office and the residential damage, the damage came up to $35,000. My business insurance reimbursed me for equipment and data recovery. Our homeowner's policy did not reimburse us for household items. We were shy of the deductible. Interestingly, we've replaced every kitchen and laundry appliance since that storm. I am convinced the lifespans of our appliances was compromised. I got an estimate for a lightning rod. It came up to around $20K (scratch that idea). So now, I've rearranged all of my equipment--desktop computer, cords, UPS backup/surge protectors, USB cables, CAT 5 cables, Phone wires, cable modem, router switch, etc. are now off of the floor. Now that I know about lighting plasma and how it travels along the ground I am fanatical---I've installed four separate UPS protectors. One for the PC, Scanner,and two monitors. Another for the modem, router/switch, and phone. My printer has a dedicated UPS (24" Epson printer only uses 80 watts), and another UPS for the NAS server. So far, so good. Oh, we've since eliminated all trees near our house--they are lightning magnets. Those "surge protectors" that the power companies sell for about $150 might help if lightning strikes a power line, but our power lines are underground. And yes, the house had one installed anyway. Nothing, and I mean nothing except a lightning rod, will prevent a direct lighting strike from damaging electronic and electrical equipment.
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Just has an older (circa 2005) APC Back-UPS XS 1000 UPS unit die on me. It's probably the battery but does anyone have positive or negative recommendations for a replacement unit?
Ctein had a post about this (http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2013/12/ups-is-your-friend.html) on The Online Photographer a few weeks ago. Might be useful.
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Ctein had a post about this (http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2013/12/ups-is-your-friend.html) on The Online Photographer a few weeks ago. Might be useful.
Ctein picked up a CyberPower CP1350PFCLCD PFC Sinewave UPS 1350VA 810W PFC. It's a really nice UPS that puts out a pure sine wave. If you are running a server, it's an especially good idea to use a UPS that produces a pure sine wave. Most UPS backups simulate a sine wave through software. If you look at the waveform on an oscilloscope, there is a lot of distortion. I opted for an APC SMT750 Smart-UPS 750VA LCD 120V. It also generates a pure sine wave. It is about $100 more than the one Ctein uses. The main reason I chose an APC unit is brand loyalty. I've never had one go bad, the batteries are readily available and easy to change. I only use this UPS for the NAS server. All other equipment is plugged into regular UPS boxes.
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The lightning made contact with the TV coax cable buried a few inches below the surface of the ground. The cable leads into our our house. Once the plasma entered through the cable into our house, it traversed the entire the length until it reached ground outside. I wasn't home, but my wife and dog were. Our 45 pound dog jumped into my wife's arms My wife's hair and the dog's fur stood on end. They felt the plasma coursing through the house. I pulled into the driveway only moments after the strike. I walked into the house and just about every electronic device, appliances, radio, whatever either got fried or half-fried. Buzzers buzzing, alarms going off, the TV turned itself on with volume full blast, and all of the UPS backups were chirping away. Eerie. In my office, I lost both printers--a 24" and a 44" Epson. My production computer, laptop, scanner, etc, all plugged into UPS backups, got toasted. Some devices such as external hard drives that were not even plugged into an outlet got messed up.
It's likely that a huge electromagnetic pulse fried the circuit boards of you electronics and the coax cable was just an incidental bystander. A number of years ago when I was a post-doctoral fellow at Cornell we had a very expensive instrument circuit board fried because on of my lab mates was doing an experiment involving extremely high pulses of electro-magnetic current to jump the temperature in a reaction vessel five feet from the instrument I was using. You could see the spark arc across the air to an unshielded micro-ammeter, really quite dramatic. The Russians for years continued to use vacuum tube equipment for sensitive military purposes for just this reason; they are much more resistant to high EMF pulses than solid state gear.
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It's likely that a huge electromagnetic pulse fried the circuit boards of you electronics and the coax cable was just an incidental bystander. A number of years ago when I was a post-doctoral fellow at Cornell we had a very expensive instrument circuit board fried because on of my lab mates was doing an experiment involving extremely high pulses of electro-magnetic current to jump the temperature in a reaction vessel five feet from the instrument I was using. You could see the spark arc across the air to an unshielded micro-ammeter, really quite dramatic. The Russians for years continued to use vacuum tube equipment for sensitive military purposes for just this reason; they are much more resistant to high EMF pulses than solid state gear.
Perhaps in very specialized applications, but the adverse risk is they produce an EMF signature which is the bane of TEMPEST managers everywhere. It's generally easier to shield equipment than maintain using tube technology. Another reason is both the cost and their lack of progress making hardened chips.. something their partnership (with us) in space I'd guess helped them with tremendously. The primary reason to use tubes is the same reason we still use them in the west, their power handing capabilities. Ask any engineer at a radio station of more than 10kw.. their tubes run up to walk-in size where their AM stations can put in tens of thousands of watts from tubes that can last virtually forever by simply replacing filaments.
Reading through this thread.. and really no disrespect intended because UPS companies purposely make understanding the subject difficult.. there's a lot of errors. And technology changes. For example, those in the "know" used to demand a class A output (pure sinewave) because the poor quality Class C&D outputs (clipped to square waves and only part of the cycle) could overheat and damage equipment.. meanwhile regular consumers were buying bargain UPS's thinking they got a great deal. And then the industry went and changed things.. where most power supplies for computers, cameras, etc.. (not strobes) will run just fine on the lower quality power.. and it took forever for those in the know to stop wasting their money.. It's complicated and changes all the time and if you don't keep up with this stuff for your employment purposes you'll probably find you're missing stuff.
Generally speaking.. from a totally non-technical viewpoint.. Match the budget of your UPS to that of your equipment. Don't buy a $150 UPS to protect your new $5000 workstation. And conversely you don't need a $700 UPS to protect your $500 special. Generally.. server class UPS devices of the proper power rating (use the manufacturers power rating calculators) are what you're looking for if you have an expensive workstation and you want it protected as well as it can be.
These can be expensive which is why I posted the link for APC's Factory Outlet (http://buy.apc.com/commerce/storefronts/etail/foLanding.aspx?storefrontcode=apcfs&countrycode=us) where you can score fantastic deals on UPS devices, often 20-30 cents on the dollar. (just noticed, the link I posted below was a bad link, sorry) I've used their outlet for.. 20 years through several different contractors and APC has set their standards and monitored them well. I've not once needed to return one and I typically run 5-7 of them at a time. They have always came with new batteries and I once asked UPS about this and was told their contract makes this a requirement. Not sure if it still does, but they come with new batteries regardless. A server class UPS device from the Outlet will cost less than a consumer grade device new.
The biggest one in their "computer" section at this time is a 1200VA model with management and shutdown software f (http://www.apc.com/resource/include/techspec_index.cfm?base_sku=BR1200W&ISOCountryCode=us&segmentID=1&tsk=&tab=features)or $149 The cheapest is a 350VA model for $49 which is (http://www.apc.com/resource/include/techspec_index.cfm?base_sku=BE350GW&ISOCountryCode=us&segmentID=1&tsk=) probably great for protecting your modem/router or maybe a remote printer.
The biggest server class is this 750VA Smart UPS model for $300 (http://www.apc.com/resource/include/techspec_index.cfm?base_sku=SUA750XLW&ISOCountryCode=us&segmentID=1&tsk=&tab=models)and would probably be fine for a new Mac Pro or an Ivy/Haswell PC that draws little power and has a reasonable number of drives.. They have bigger ones all the way out to 5000VA and sometimes if they get a lot of one model, it will be a fraction of what they'd normally charge.
It's important to know the outlets are designed for specific protection types, and you really don't want to run power strips with multiple devices into them..
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Thanks everyone.
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It's likely that a huge electromagnetic pulse fried the circuit boards of you electronics and the coax cable was just an incidental bystander. A number of years ago when I was a post-doctoral fellow at Cornell we had a very expensive instrument circuit board fried because on of my lab mates was doing an experiment involving extremely high pulses of electro-magnetic current to jump the temperature in a reaction vessel five feet from the instrument I was using. You could see the spark arc across the air to an unshielded micro-ammeter, really quite dramatic. The Russians for years continued to use vacuum tube equipment for sensitive military purposes for just this reason; they are much more resistant to high EMF pulses than solid state gear.
The place where the lightning struck was at ground, four inches above the coax cable and a pvc irrigation pipe. A six inch section of both the pipe and the coax were completely vaporized. A few of my friend are EEs; they used the the term plasma. Would that be the same as EMF pulses?
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Hey Steve, thanks for the heads-up about the APC factory outlet. Go figure...
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The place where the lightning struck was at ground, four inches above the coax cable and a pvc irrigation pipe. A six inch section of both the pipe and the coax were completely vaporized. A few of my friend are EEs; they used the the term plasma. Would that be the same as EMF pulses?
I've lived a number of years in Pensacola and can well remember the lightening storms there. I'm a ham operator and this was one fo the most challenging places to protect the antennas and gear indoors. We'd go so far as to have different ground fields for power and signal. Most of the ground systems in homes that I've seen are almost like an afterthought to the main power block. A good ground is expensive, especially in sandy soil like we had in Pensacola (and likely in Tampa as well?) often requiring a series of ground rods sunk as much as 21-28 feet to adequately route a lightening strike.. And copper ain't cheap these days.. :)
I've seen lightening hit in the trees 20-30 feet from the house and that was enough to energize the ground rod system where the power would then go up the 00 gauge ground wire into the house to the equipment bench where I had a 1/4 inch thick by 2 inches tall by 6 feet wide on standoffs from one side of the bench to the other. The chassis of all equipment on the bench had a 1/2 inch braided copper wire to a big clamp. When operating these clamps were connected to the ground bar. And each piece of coax coming from a signal source (antenna) would go through a gas charged arrestor that was grounded to the same bar. The ground field outside that the ground bar was grounded through was 6 21 foot deep 3/4 thick rods all connected through the 00 gauge copper ground wire. Anyway, when a storm hit we'd pull the clamps off the ground bar totally disconnecting the outdoor ground from the equipment. With that hefty system I was pretty sure I was good to go. The first time I storm hit lightening hit the trees to the sandy soil, was picked up by the ground system, and fed back into the house and into the ground bar. With no where to go the lightening jumped from the ground bar to the clamps hanging free over 2 feet away! Another got the metal bottom of my chair.
This sounds like what happened to you in a basic way. Electricity, depending on the power involved, can jump distances that would surprise most.
We called up the company that measured my soil and certified 21 feet was deep enough.. they told me the toasted gear, chair, etc, was a 'residual' power strike, that the main part went down the rods to ground. Hmm. Always hard to tell. We sunk them another 14 feet (one fits in the other so you can keep adding more and airhammer them down) and never had an issue in the next 8 years I lived there.
With such a close hit.. you could have had cables on the other side of the room and it still would have jumped. That lightening rod system starts to sound cheap on a permanent residence..
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Hey Steve, thanks for the heads-up about the APC factory outlet. Go figure...
A pleasure. Often what they sell at the Outlet is a sales year behind.. but so what..
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Straightforward explanation of what happens in a lightning event
http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/natural-disasters/lightning.htm
and why MOV surge protectors don't work.
Frank
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Straightforward explanation of what happens in a lightning event
http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/natural-disasters/lightning.htm
and why MOV surge protectors don't work.
Frank
Metal Oxide Varistor's cost about 15 cents each.. and what's great about them is you can put one in a 50 cent 6 outlet "thingy" and now it has a name.. "surge protector." But the best part is you can now sell it for $25. $150 if you're Monster Cable.
There are actually two main reasons they don't work. 1. They don't react nearly fast enough (they they are useful certain kinds of "surges" but never "strikes"). 2. MOV's need a good ground to work and most house grounds are inadequate.