I have one of the nicer APC units (for use in offices, not racks). Recently, when the power blipped, it went into backup mode and got stuck there, draining the battery. I had to physically unplug it and plug it back in to get it to turn back on.
I'm not sure if there's a decent UPS brand any more. I get the impression APC has been going downhill since the acquisition.
> I'm not sure if there's a decent UPS brand any more. I get the impression APC has been going downhill since the acquisition.
I’ve noticed a similar thing.
I had a 2005 Smart-UPS tower that never failed, but developed some transformer buzz that was annoying in an office environment—and hey, improved standby efficiency and an LCD panel would be nice—so I replaced it in 2013 with its latest equivalent. This one ran for about nine years and then started rebooting itself randomly, dropping the load each time. (It had no issues transferring and holding a load on battery, and self-test passed.) Its 2022 replacement now uses a non-standard USB-A male-to-male cable, is missing information that used to exist in the LCD menu, seems to have a problem charging from 98% to 100%, and has a broken event log (event 1 is always “Site wiring” and every other event is always “None”, even though there have been multiple power events, and there is no site wiring issue). It works, but QA issues are evident.
I’d previously tried a prosumer-grade CyberPower UPS (CP1500PFCLCD) on some other less critical equipment. When its battery failed after two years, it cut power to the load. When the charger failed a few years later, it cut power to the load. It died completely in about six years.
Tripp-Lite’s consumer grade stuff seems to work well enough for what it is, but their higher-end equipment seemed to all be designed for environments where noise doesn’t matter, which makes it a non-starter for an office. Eaton (their parent) seems the same.
So it would be great to know what is an actually good choice these days. At the moment I’m not in the market for anything and hopefully what I’ve got will run for another decade, but if it doesn’t, I have no good idea about what else to buy today.
> event 1 is always “Site wiring” and every other event is always “None”, even though there have been multiple power events, and there is no site wiring issue
Some UPS:es are adamant about wanting live and neutral on specific pins on the power plug and will throw that error message if they're swapped.
If it's a reversible power plug, flip it around. If the power plug can only be connected in one orientation the outlet is likely incorrectly installed (which is not all that uncommon, as 99.99% of stuff will work perfectly fine with live and neutral swapped).
> I’d previously tried a prosumer-grade CyberPower UPS (CP1500PFCLCD) on some other less critical equipment. When its battery failed after two years, it cut power to the load. When the charger failed a few years later, it cut power to the load. It died completely in about six years.
I've never (n=4) had a stock CyberPower UPS battery last me 2 years. 3rd party replacement batteries have all lasted significantly longer than what shipped in the box.
Mine has been running fine for 4 years now. It's a PR1500ELCD so one step up from the CP1500PFCLCD. I also bought it directly from the official distributor in my country if that matters.
No one on this site has a large enough sample size to speak authoritatively about the quality of consumer-oriented UPSes.
In my home right now, I have an APC (Schneider) Back-UPS Pro 1000, Tripp Lite (Eaton) AVR550U, and CyberPower CP1500PFCLCDa.
I purchased the APC in April 2017, the CyberPower in Nov 2020, and the Tripp Lite in Sep 2021.
The APC was originally for all my IT gear but for some reason that load caused it to cycle to battery at random times. I replaced it with the CyberPower which works fine with my IT gear. Meanwhile the APC works fine with my AV gear where I re-purposed it.
Both of those are still on their original batteries which I test every 6 months.
The Tripp Lite I use at my desk and I also test it every 6 months, but last month the power went out and the Tripp Lite immediately shut down. The battery had failed w/o warning and the Tripp Lite battery-monitoring is apparently useless since it still thought the battery was good when power was restored, but an actual load test proved otherwise.
When I replaced the battery, the Tripp Lite had a cheap Chinese battery in it. I replaced it with a Duracell (manufactured in Vietnam). I've had less trouble with non-Chinese UPS batteries.
Another fun thing: Tripp Lite has reused the model "AVR550U" for three different UPSes all which use a different battery. Turns out my version uses the quite common APC RBC2 sized 7Ah battery.
Which is all to say: I've had a lot of UPSes over the years and you can't make any claims about any single manufacturer. They all manufacture a range of models and none of us have any actual data about failure rates. The best you can do if you have the expertise is to take one apart and evaluate its design and manufacturing quality.
I have an Eaton 5P1150i that was about half that. It has plenty of capacity to run my NAS, webserver, router, switch and one access point for about half an hour. IIRC I paid around €450 for it.
I'm not sure if there's a decent UPS brand any more. I get the impression APC has been going downhill since the acquisition.