Lighting Protection

[Anonymous user]

We have a number of UPS units (which are mostly 2200VA Rack mounts) in our server rooms providing battery power to our equipment. We get bad lightning storms in the area, and there are a few instances a year where equipment behind the UPS units is affected by the strikes.

I thought adding a second layer of just surge protection would be advisable to try and mitigate this, but was wondering if the surge units should be placed before the UPS (plugged directly into the building power) or behind them (servers plugged into surge which is plugged into UPS), and if anyone had any specific model recommendations.

Thanks for any help anyone can give.

[Anonymous user]

Your building should have lightning protection, regardless of whether it's a data center or not.

Also, cheap UPS will not filter out spikes like good UPSs will. If it's line interactive, it won't filter out much. If it's a double conversion UPS, it completely breaks down the AC sine wave into DC then re-creates... a "perfect" sine wave.

This question is actually answered here, a little better than I can: http://www.datacenterfix.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=68

[Anonymous user]

We have a number of UPS units (which are mostly 2200VA Rack mounts) in our server rooms providing battery power to our equipment. We get bad lightning storms in the area, and there are a few instances a year where equipment behind the UPS units is affected by the strikes.

I thought adding a second layer of just surge protection would be advisable to try and mitigate this, but was wondering if the surge units should be placed before the UPS (plugged directly into the building power) or behind them (servers plugged into surge which is plugged into UPS), and if anyone had any specific model recommendations.

Thanks for any help anyone can give.

[BillP · Accepted solution]

Even "cheap" line-interactive units will protect against surges as much as any other unit; they also have voltage regulation to protect against under- or overvoltage conditions. They'll switch to battery if the power goes outside of its regulation range, and in the worst case scenario, will sacrifice themselves as Erasmus said to absorb a surge rather than allow the equipment to be damaged. If they were "cheap" and couldn't do that much, they wouldn't have equipment protection policies (APC units do).

It may be worth mentioning that surges can travel along data cables (such as network cables) as well as power cords...