I’m running a rather small homelab and am hunting for a good UPS to help keep everything running smoothly. My top priorities are:
- Just enough battery life to keep things running until they can be shut down
- Compatible with open source software for monitoring and automated shutdown
Would I have better luck getting a used one and a new battery, or a brand new unit altogether? Anyone have one they don’t need anymore, on that note? 👀
Thanks for the advice!
An APC from wherever. Just don’t buy a CyberPower. They’re much cheaper for a reason and cause more downtime than they save.
Meanwhile, I’ve had nothing but trouble with consumer APC and find Cyberpower’s bullet proof. Had one that went 10yrs before any issues, and a second with 3+ and counting, no problem.
An alternative to both is the burgeoning battery banks for camping/emergency power. Most of these offer UPS quality switching times, so they can act as a UPS when not in use for an emergency. Ecoflow/ anker solix/etc. A big advantage of these is the battery chemistry is very long lived and much better than UPS lead acid. Dont expect a pure sinewave, but you weren’t going to get that from most consumer UPS anyway.
I’m still looking for a good UPS that can run on 12 V DC from the car’s outlet and power usb devices
This Anker does all of the above. Its switching speed is 10ms, so it fits the UPS niche as well.
Why not mine is a pure sine wave. More expensive then an inline ups though.
I have dealt with a lot of units over the years, both consumer and professional. I have had more non-battery issues with APC ones than the Cyberpower ones, especially with the rack mount units.
For batteries they all have a lifetime, so I don’t trash a brand simply because the battery dies. That will happen to any UPS battery. However it is well known that APC floats the batteries too high resulting in slightly more runtime at the expense of battery longevity. I have replaced more APC batteries as a result.
All of that said, at the consumer level I just tell people to go buy whichever one is on sale at that moment since at least one of them usually is.
Was going to say this too. I boitstrapped a financial trading compny using mostly cyberpower uos at the desks so have run a few hubdred of them over the last fifteen years with nounexpected problems. Replace them after fice years and rarely hd any die prematurely. Not to say this is a good idea, just that it imokies quality iant terrible. Lol
Despite your odd luck with batteries, CyberPower has an issue that disqualifies it from use personally or professionally for me, which is that if there’s a problem with the battery, which there too often is, a CyberPower will cut power to the entire unit, even if it’s still receiving power from the wall outlet.
With an APC, at least if the battery dies your devices stay on.
My CyberPower is 14 years old now still working fine, just needed battery swap at 10 year mark.
Never had a problem with cyber power yet.
The problem is when you do, instead of their units continuing to power your devices via power from the wall, they shut off power to all their battery ports. So CyberPower battery units can and will cause outages for your devices without you even having a power outage event. It’s a critical design flaw their competitors don’t share.
Haven’t had this happen. Battery pack failed after 10 years. Unit still provided mains AC through battery backup plugs. There is a switcher inside to flip between mains and battery…maybe that was going bad in what you describe.
I’ve never seen a CyberPower not cut power to its battery ports when the battery failed, which I’ve seen dozens of times since the failure rate on them was bordering on the absurd. When contacting CyberPower to warranty them, they told us that was normal and that the units were designed that way.
I guess in my case the batteries may have had enough to signal they were functional, but they were effectively dead and had no UPS backup sustaining power. One battery had started to buldge its container. I can see it as being an as designed feature, that way they never let you down in a powerfailure event, as you get advanced notice that the battery is no longer working LOL. Had a corporation go down a few years ago, they had not replaced UPS batteries, when power wentout all UPS batteries were dead and couldn’t sustain the servers until backup generator came online.