[BBLISA] UPS suggestion

[Daniel Hagerty]

"Edward Ned Harvey" <bblisa3 at nedharvey.com> writes:

> At a former company, I had Backups instead of Smartups.  Because it was =
> cheaper and I couldn't produce any compelling reason to care.  If I =
> remember right ... First of all ... I think the backups does not allow =
> hotswapping of batteries.  I think they both behave gracefully in =
> over-load conditions.  I think the backups maybe had no way to monitor =
> it.  In fact, now that I think of it, I think the backups doesn't allow =
> changing of batteries at all.  I'm unsure.

    Not having closely examined the backups I have, I'd expect it not
to allow battery swapping.  It's a home unit.  I can afford to shut it
down and swap in a new unit -- I'm not trying for five 9s, and the
unit was probably $50.

    It does have a light weight amount of monitoring through it's usb
port; mine has some sense of load and battery time (which I of course
take with a healthy grain of salt).

> I know we had some backups of the extra cheap type, something like =
> BE550G, that stayed at peoples' desks.  Occasionally without any power =
> interruption, the devices would just start beeping as if there was a =
> power interruption.  (Once every ... I guess 3-4 months).  So users =
> would basically panic, and press the big button UPS, which is the power =
> button, causing an outage for themselves.  I learned if it happened, you =
> only needed to touch the little "test" button and it would go back to =
> normal.  It was weird.

    I do get a once in a blue moon transient, but knowing the power
company, it's a genuine brief transient and not a false under
voltage.  In some cases I've noticed a flicker in the lights as it
does it.  Stuff not on UPS hasn't ever dropped during these
(especially my wife's mac, they put serious supplies in those things).