Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) recommendations and advice
Hello everyone,
I usually do my own research, and then I try to find multiple matching results and afterwards, read specifically in detail about each recommendation, but, I have to be honest that for UPS recommendations that I’ve seen, it seems to be a very personal recommendation depending on the wattage and connected devices.
First of all, most people recommend CyberPower or APC, but I’ve also seen some recommendations for Eaton. Is there any other brand that I should be looking into?
The devices I would like to connect to a UPS would be: desktop, TV, Apple TV, NAS, router and probably my Nintendo Switch.
There are some general things I've found out while searching that I think I would like some confirmation:
- I actually think I should buy two UPS's, or? I think just one for the desktop and another one just for the remaining devices, since the desktop uses a lot more wattage.
- Pure Sine Wave: It does not matter for smaller stuff (routers, etc) but it seems that anything above 70 W, it should use a UPS with this. So, that would mean I need pure sine wave, since my desktop and TV definitely use more than 70 W of power.
- Some people said to search for a UPS with line conditioning so that you always get a perfect sine wave. Would you agree?
- USB connection (not a faux USB!) so that the NAS detects the power failure and shuts down gracefully.
- It is important that the UPS has removable battery for better longevity.
How would I choose a UPS? Do I need to see the total wattage of all my devices and then pick the UPS accordingly? Anything I'm missing?
My budget would be up to €100 or €150 in case it is really worth it.
Thank you in advance for all replies.
Why do you want anything besides the NAS and PC plugged in to the UPS? With that much plugged in, your UPS will most likely last only a few minutes. The point of a UPS isn't to be able to actively use those devices during a power outage, but to give you enough time for them to gracefully shut down (or just power through if it's a brief outage).
And if you have both your NAS and desktop PC plugged in to the UPS, which one would get the USB connection to the UPS? Most only support one connection at a time. So one of the devices wouldn't ever know the UPS had kicked on and that it should shut down.
If you want to protect your other devices, I'd suggest a high quality surge protector. TVs respond pretty well to having the metaphorical power rug pulled out from under them and Switch doesn't need a UPS since it has a built in battery.
One suggestion I'd make before purchasing one is to get a cheap current monitor like this one. Obviously you'd need one that's the correct voltage, plug, etc. for your country. They're pretty cheap and it can be useful to have around in the future.
Plug everything in, see what the power usage is and add a bit more headroom (25-30% seems reasonable) and then choose the appropriate size from any of the brands you mentioned. They're all reputable, so go with whichever is the least expensive.
I have to be honest, maybe I'm confusing the purpose of a UPS? I wanted to protect all of those devices from frying during a thunderstorm, for example. Nevertheless, I know that nothing will protect you from a direct lightning strike.
I guess then I really need two UPS's. Thanks!
I actually just did that and bought two Belkin surge protectors and connected all the devices I just mentioned. Tripp-Lite are recommended, but I could not find them here in Germany.
Thanks for the suggestion!
A UPS is overkill for surge protection; you probably just want a surge protector for most things. The UPS is, as @JXM said, intended to keep power on for important devices so that you can gracefully shut them off, instead of having them lose power and power down poorly. Of the things you have listed:
I actually have each of the things on UPSes on separate UPSes, but it's only because I have extra UPSes. If I only had one, I'd probably just have the NAS.
The more items you have on a UPS, the faster it gets used up; they're basically just a big battery.
Thanks a lot for the clarification.
Then, I already have the surge protectors for the other devices. Now, I just need to find the right UPS's for the NAS, router and desktop.
To speak to the original question: some of the things that you are considering aren't things that I would recommend even thinking about. Here's what I have asked myself when purchasing a UPS:
Those are the only things I've typically considered, and I haven't been steered wrong by that.
The good news is that if you wanted to get a UPS for both, the NAS will require very little power, so you don't have to buy two expensive UPSes. The one for the NAS could definitely be a smaller, more basic one.
Depending on your risk tolerance, it's worth considering whether the UPS brings much to the table at all - modern filesystems are fairly resilient even in the face of sudden power loss, so the assurance you're buying is pretty specifically to protect the integrity of the single file you might be saving from the desktop to NAS at the moment of the outage.
Depending on the frequency of outages in your area, how often you back up off-site, and how significant the loss of that one in-progress piece of work might be to you, it might not actually represent value over just the surge protectors.
You could always run NUT on the NAS to interact with the UPS over USB, and trigger the desktop and router over the network to shut down in a sensible order. Takes a bit of setting up but supports most common units and has served me well in the past.
I will say that you're not going to get too much runtime out of almost anything in the <$150 range (USA context), especially not with everything listed.
I have an older APC1500 (retails about $220 US). I run a setup similiar to what you want. Here's some arbitrary guesses for your setup:
With that wattage, you're looking at about 10 minutes of runtime. It's about what I see, but then I also only need it to run for ~1 minute until the generator kicks on.
Before I had a generator, I still had the same setup, but I leveraged the automatic shutdown stuff better (@JXM):
That would give me about 1 hour of runtime for those two, keeping my media and wireless available. So the NAS would then initiate a shutdown after 20 minutes unless it was cancelled by power restoration or my manual intervention. This would typically get me an extra hour or so for just keeping internet live.
It struck a nice balance, but also required a lot of setup to get right. TBH these days I'd probably just hook up the NAS and router, have NAS shutdown after 10 minutes and get more runtime for the wifi.
Basically, then my question would be, does it make sense to plug in all of these devices? From what I've read, most people only connect the NAS, desktop and router. I mentioned all of these devices on my post because they are the most valuable hardware that I have and wanted to protect them from power failures during thunderstorms (or any other situation) and my goal is not to keep using them during a power failure. It seems a lot of people want to continue using the devices until the power comes back on, but in my case I just want to protect the devices from frying and shut them down gracefully. Nevertheless, I actually bought two Belkin surge protectors while I do not have any UPS.