UPS or not UPS, that is the question

Node Operators
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1

I just found that my UPS eats about 140W in addition to my servers.
It is online UPS 9130i 1000R
Servers eats 380W but all together it is 520W.
I didnt measured yet how much my offline UPSs eats, but i hope it is much less than that.
so this big amount of cost makes me question is it worth to use UPS?

2

How often do you have power outage ? In terms of hours per week or month.

3

in last half a year had 2 of them, with 1h and 2h so UPS do not help

4

Then in my opinion, it is not worth adding UPS to the mix. Use those 1h and 2h for maintenance instead like cleaning around the servers or inside the servers.

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5

Online UPSes are the least efficient since they are always converting from AC to DC then back to AC. An offline or line-interactive UPS will have significantly lower waste.

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6

Usually the power outages happen at the most inconvenient time and to clean the servers I need my air compressor which needs electricity.

My big UPS converts more power into heat, because it is a more powerful model and somewhat old. I also have a generator.

An on-line UPS is less efficient, but it can clean up the power, output a different voltage from input and run from somewhat degraded input (voltage out of spec for example). In my case, the generator produces power that not all devices (particularly off-line UPSs) like, but the big UPS can clean it up.

7

I can totally relate to that but I use a simple painting brush and blow air with my mouth or just use a big cardboard and blow some air on it. The hour just goes by doing all that.

8

If this is the Eaton UPS you should try “High Efficiency mode”, which basically makes it an Offline UPS.

I have a couple of APC UPS and they’ve been quite handy in gracefully shutting off my servers when there is an outage for more than a minute.

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9

ok thanks for info, I didnt know that something like this is possible.

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10

In addition for switching to standby UPS, if you don’t have brownouts and fairly stable power where when shuts off it’s shuts off cleanly and infrequently — you can consider disabling write caching, re-enabling sync, and removing UPS. With current low load it shall be feasible.

11

Holy … cow… I have been completely oblivious to this distinction previously.

Great, something to add to my To-Do list.

Thanks…
… and I mean that.

2 cents,
Julio

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