Comment by wakeupcall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wakeupcall | Hacker News Reader

Would be nice to know what other people recommend for UPSs with sine-wave output.

Small APC units are pretty crappy by my own experience as well, especially if you go below 700VA.

I've used several 1000VA back-ups, smart-ups, and while the build quality is generally ok, the trip time for triggering and voltage upregulation was next to useless (passing >500ms). Many back-ups units tend to trigger the differential. The batteries you get from APC itself are just plainly overpriced.

I generally prefer to have many smaller upses nowdays, so I went with a few back-ups rs 500 and two cyberpower (cp900epfclcd).

Upregulation of the rs500 is a joke that you cannot rely on. The output quality is "passable" at best. It's also a pretty basic plastic case, pretty much like the cyberpower. When powered off, it keeps on flipping the main input relay every 10 seconds until it's fully disconnected from the mains.

On the other hand I didn't own cyberpower units for 10+ years like I did for APC, so I cannot truly comment on that.

Can somebody recommend alternatives that truly perform their duty?

I have similar Cyberpower UPS' and started doing research finding a good alternative. I thought since I got it from Costco I was getting a decently quality item but searching on Amazon and their sponsored ads made me realize I made a mistake buying it. I'm always leery when a product is "sponsored" on Amazon.

Looking through reddit and other forums, seems like APC Prosumer highend versions are okay (so not all APCs) and Eaton/TrippLite UPS'. Some say Tripp Lite isn't as good.

I just went to CDW and bought x2 Eaton 5SC model that is sine-wave. They are much more expensive, 1500VA was $420 vs the CyberPower I got for about $180. Eaton has cheaper versions but I dont see sine-wave as a feature so I assume it might be more simulated sine.

Back when I was the Testbed Manager for the Defense Systems Information Agency DISANet LAN, one of the things we were going to be doing was deploying over 50 servers in different data centers around the world, some of which would be in classified environments. We needed some reliable UPSes for some of those environments, because not all of the data centers had reliable power.

We looked at several brands, and one of them was APC. We bought them from the various vendors, instead of having them sent to us by their sales people, so that we would have a more representative idea of what it would be like to actually own a fleet of these things. One thing that impressed me about APC was that they seemed to be smaller but more ruggedly built than any of the others we were looking at. Unfortunately, when I plugged that unit in, it sounded like a chainsaw.

So, I called up the company, and explained who I was and what we were doing. Not much reaction from the tech support person I was talking to. Then I told them what the problem was. They told me to ship it back to them (on our dime), and they'd look at it. I tried to explain again who I was and what we were doing, but they stayed on script.

Then I got a bright idea and told them to wait while I held out the phone to let them hear what it sounded like. As I was bringing the phone back to my ear, what I heard was "... pping out by Federal Express, next day air". Lo and behold, the replacement did actually arrive at the office next day, with instructions to mail back the failed unit at our leisure and all expenses paid by APC. And the replacement was quiet. We bought 50 of them -- one for each server. So far as I know, they never failed.

I've continued to be a loyal APC customer ever since 1993, and the one and only problem I've ever had with any of them over the decades has been that the batteries sometimes need to be replaced. But spares of those types are kept in stock by every Batteries Plus or Microcenter store that I've seen here in the US. Less than five minutes to replace them.

I do go for the SmartUPS line, over the BackUPS. And I buy units that I can guarantee will give me extended run times on 15amp circuits.

Worth every penny.

I did use several smartups ones at 1500VA, and the metal construction was full metal, passive cooling on the interior with ample empty space, nice battery connections. At work we have larger APC racks for server backup and so far we didn't really experience problems. But the larger enterprise sector seems to be quite different than the consumer sector.

As I wrote before, I'm not powering servers and I actually went the route to place a smaller ups close to each load individually to avoid single points of failure and also avoid complicating central cabling. Just because I'm going for smaller sizes it doesn't mean I'm trying to cheap-out, quite the contrary.

For the smaller power lineup, APC definitely is not better than cyberpower in my eyes. In fact, the back-ups rs line is almost twice as expensive as cyberpower and I'm not really satisfied at all. The cyberpower unit has actually sine wave output for the same cost, upregulation works even at very light loads, and it's also a much quieter unit compared to the APCs when idle (when driving load both units buzz loudly). When having several in the same location, this does make a difference.

Opened up, both have the same quality of construction. Which is probably adequate, I guess. But having a metal shield around the battery would have been sensible.

The APC higher end "Smart-UPS" models might still be good, I've used them for a couple of decades without these sorts of problems, current 750 kVA one bought in 2017, just had to replace the battery at its prompting only a month ago or so (that's normal).

I can also attest their consumer level including the "Back-UPS" models are subpar. Had one bought by a parent arc inside when I was trying to diagnose what was wrong with it.

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