UPS power requirements

[mbntr]

SO I got an APC CS 500, an old relic, but, with a new battery it seems to work fine.

According to the specifications it's only capable of 300W, but is this when on battery backup or even when the power is on

[Bombastinator]

Probably just battery backup. It should be just battery backup.  They’d have to do something dumb for it to be both.  I’m not sure though.  Dumb happens.  The thing is if the system draws over 300w it’s going to still do that when the power goes out so it kind of doesn’t matter.  Does the thing have some ports that aren’t battery backed up and some ports that are?  This was pretty common.

[mbntr]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

Probably just battery backup. It should be just battery backup.  They’d have to do something dumb for it to be both.  I’m not sure though.  Dumb happens.  The thing is if the system draws over 300w it’s going to still do that when the power goes out so it kind of doesn’t matter.  Does the thing have some ports that aren’t battery backed up and some ports that are?  This was pretty common.

well, the system draws 300w only during FAH, Gaming (less though) and similar things, if I know the power went out I can shut whatever is using the GPU really fast, the UPS should be able to withstand a small overload for some seconds while i do it and power off the PC.

At idle my setup (thankfully)  uses far less power.

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

 Does the thing have some ports that aren’t battery backed up and some ports that are?  This was pretty common.

yes, it has one that is only for surge protection

[Bombastinator]

14 minutes ago, mbntr said:

well, the system draws 300w only during FAH, Gaming (less though) and similar things, if I know the power went out I can shut whatever is using the GPU really fast, the UPS should be able to withstand a small overload for some seconds while i do it and power off the PC.

At idle my setup (thankfully)  uses far less power.

yes, it has one that is only for surge protection

If you put that on,say, monitor or some such you could lower system draw.  It would limit you to hitting power off (not long press) for managed power shutdown because you wouldn’t be able to see anything.  Overdrawing power can be very bad for batteries and the ups might not even be capable of it depending on where the system bottleneck is.  This sounds like you may be pushing the limits a bit close.  You could always test it if you’ve got it on hand to see what happens in various scenarios.  UPSes are all about hardware and data safety.

[wanderingfool2]

14 minutes ago, mbntr said:

well, the system draws 300w only during FAH, Gaming (less though) and similar things, if I know the power went out I can shut whatever is using the GPU really fast, the UPS should be able to withstand a small overload for some seconds while i do it and power off the PC.

At idle my setup (thankfully)  uses far less power.

The first thing is to check if the unit was actually part of the recall (those units had a recall notice on them)

 

https://www.apc.com/ca/en/faqs/index?page=content&id=FA158865&actp=search&viewlocale=en_US

 

Do you know how much watts it uses at idle or what it peaks at when shutting down the PC.  (Is that 300W including the monitor?)

 

In general though, when it comes to UPS's I try erring on the side of caution (not to put more load on it than it was designed for).  The reason is, there is additional circuitry inside there to handle the switch off between battery and grid power (and my assumption would be that the circuitry would also be  designed to only handle the designated wattage) [Yes, I know there would be buffer room but still].

 

While it might not necessarily be too important to you, it also uses stepped approximation to handle the sine-wave power (which depending who you ask could be bad for electronics)

[mbntr]

5 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

The first thing is to check if the unit was actually part of the recall (those units had a recall notice on them)

 

https://www.apc.com/ca/en/faqs/index?page=content&id=FA158865&actp=search&viewlocale=en_US

 

Do you know how much watts it uses at idle or what it peaks at when shutting down the PC.  (Is that 300W including the monitor?)

 

In general though, when it comes to UPS's I try erring on the side of caution (not to put more load on it than it was designed for).  The reason is, there is additional circuitry inside there to handle the switch off between battery and grid power (and my assumption would be that the circuitry would also be  designed to only handle the designated wattage) [Yes, I know there would be buffer room but still].

 

While it might not necessarily be too important to you, it also uses stepped approximation to handle the sine-wave power (which depending who you ask could be bad for electronics)

at idle the whole thing should use less than 50w of power (according to my readings)

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, mbntr said:

at idle the whole thing should use less than 50w of power (according to my readings)

The problem is F@h is the kind of thing you run when you’re not around.

[wanderingfool2]

Just now, mbntr said:

at idle the whole thing should use less than 50w of power (according to my readings)

Including the monitor as well?  (As you would have to have your monitor plugged in to turn it off...I assume the APC 500 doesn't have an USB shutdown function)

 

With that said though, looking at the specs it says the max amp draw is 10...so I assume you are probably okay (if you only really max it to 300watts occasionally).  With that said, remember that depending what you are doing when the power goes out you will have to react in a different amount of time.  If you are maxing at 300 watts and the power goes out (well, I assume you might actually experience a system crash), but if not you will have about 1 minute to shutdown.  At 200 watts, you would have 5 minutes (this to me is a max time).

 

UPS's are really a how much you feel comfortable with in the event of a power outage (e.g. I don't care if there is a power outage and I lose stuff, so I don't run a UPS at home).  Or if there was a Windows update, would you factor that in for run time.

[mbntr]

55 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Including the monitor as well?  (As you would have to have your monitor plugged in to turn it off...I assume the APC 500 doesn't have an USB shutdown function)

 

With that said though, looking at the specs it says the max amp draw is 10...so I assume you are probably okay (if you only really max it to 300watts occasionally).  With that said, remember that depending what you are doing when the power goes out you will have to react in a different amount of time.  If you are maxing at 300 watts and the power goes out (well, I assume you might actually experience a system crash), but if not you will have about 1 minute to shutdown.  At 200 watts, you would have 5 minutes (this to me is a max time).

 

UPS's are really a how much you feel comfortable with in the event of a power outage (e.g. I don't care if there is a power outage and I lose stuff, so I don't run a UPS at home).  Or if there was a Windows update, would you factor that in for run time.

not via USB, it seems to have something like that via Ethernet, which is ineresting for a 20 year old device