UPS Input Energy reporting in Kilowatts per hour or similar.

[harryc123]

Hello,

I wonder if anyone could provide any advice on reporting on the input power that a UPS is drawing from the mains. We want to calculate what each UPS in our business draws from the mains (100 or so UPS so the more automated the better). We have tools such as EcoStructure and Solarwinds that can SNMP poll devices, but we are struggling to find the input power specifically.

We are currently polling the following OID from the Powernet MIB = upsAdvInputEnergyUsage - .1.3.6.1.4.1.318.1.1.1.3.2.15

But we notice that the reading goes up and down, we would expect something that is measuring in Kw/H would be commutative like an energy meter. I am not entirely sure if we have set the SNMP device poller up correctly as it's hard to find exactly what the settings should be.

Does anyone have experience setting up this SNMP poller or is there a better way/product to get the information we want?

Thanks for any help in advance.

[Teken]

We use a dedicated energy management system that can monitor a branch circuit or dedicated loads. As you noted the information provided by the APC unit is less than informative.

Energy monitoring / energy management is extremely important to us so we measure everything that has to do with power quality which spans basic: Voltage, Frequency, Power, Current. More advanced monitoring applies to power factor, THD, inrush current, frequency drift, 2nd / 3rd harmonics, and lightning. Specifically EMF / EMI induced conditions that translate to what people know as surge / spikes / brown out (voltage sag) vs voltage rise.

Taking all of this valuable information and integrating it into our systems allows us to know the state of health of everything in the building and not just the network. 👍

As such we can prevent and remediate hardware failures or budget to replace the same on a refresh cycle. 

[harryc123]

Thanks for the reply.

May I ask which Energy Management System you are using? And does it provide you with the correct Input Energy Usage in Kilowatts per hour of each UPS across your estate?

[Teken]

The device is made by Brultech and the unit is called the Green Eye Monitor (GEM) which has 32 electrical channels. Its companion data aggregator is called the Dashbox (DB) which allows the electrical energy to be quantified / rendered.

When the two devices are mated together it can track, monitor, aggregate, and recall: minute, hours, days, months, years, of energy consumption (KWH). It can show you the current, minimum, maximum, peak of the wattage, current.

The Dashbox provides charts, graphs, dials, to render the information for the end user. The system is completely local first vs cloud first! 👍

The system also tracks power factor, line voltage, eight 1 Wire temperature, four pulse channels, weather. The device supports lots of open source projects and software and Home Automation. Such as Home Assistant, ISY Series Controller, HomeSeer, IFTTT, MQTT, etc.

Has built in notifications via email, push, SMS. Built in user defined NTP Server for accurate time keeping.

Incorporates conditional logic to inform a user if a threshold has been met / not met.  Generally speaking the loads are monitored at the service (breaker) panel. But you can easily monitor at the device level simply by mounting the current transformer (CT) on to a split AC cord as I do. 

Please do search for Brultech using Google. 👍

NOTE: The Brultech GEM & DB are simply devices that physically connect to the electrical wiring to track the power / energy consumption. It offers conditional alert notification and much more. But the hardware does NOT physically control hardware being turned on / off. This requires third party (Home Automation) equipment to do so as noted up above. Think Z-Wave, ZigBee, Insteon, WiFi, BLE capable devices that can be switches, outlets, relays, I/O, sensors.

[harryc123]

Thanks dude - I will check it out for sure!