This question was originally posted by Davide on APC forums on 8/25/2011
Hi all...
I'm writing this thread just to inform people who want to buy this UPS.
I had 5x BackUPS PRO 1500 (BR1500GI), 1500VA 865W, three of this are working in office/home.
This is my feedback for future buyers.
1) If you get an outage during the night and your pc is off, be ready to wake up to turn off the UPS alarm. There is no way using Powerchute at the moment to avoid this problem. APC says that the problem will be corrected when it's ready, but since december 2010 I'm waiting for a fix.
2) The energy usage reported from Powerchute is completely messed up. For someone work ok, for someone else like me not. I'm waiting a fix since december but I will never see it if I will not buy a new UPS from different brands because this fix will require a new firmware and BackUPS PRO series is not firmware upgradable.
3) When there is an outage and PC is off the slave outlet is turned on, this makes slave peripherals to turn on drying your battery if the outage is long enough.
4) The battery gauge on the LCD is completely unuseful and unprecise. It takes 40 seconds with 100W load to go down to 3 of 5.
5) Some UPS is noisy, really boring in the night when you have a silent room.
6) We are in fall 2011 and powerchute continue to have problems with windows UAC asking for permission on every boot (there is some workaround but isn't listed on APC FAQ).
7) The last but not the least. The runtime seen in the specs is absolutely not correct. Every unit I had, lasted from 35% to 45% less than what is reported on the specs.
8) You will never know if your unit is new or refurbished. Their return policy is too easy, can't trust that the returned UPSd is not sold as new after some testing.
APC is the best IT company in terms of customer care but they need more QA before selling expensive products with no added value if not for return policy.
I will buy another APC product only for their customer care/return policy but I lost some confidence in their products.
Too bugs, too slow fixing them if they will ever fix it.
Just my two cents.
Message was edited by: sblantipodi