ES 350VA APC failing overnight?

[Anonymous user]

Hi, I'm new here and need some help. We have a ES 350VA 200 watt battery backup here at our office and we are running a mac G5 tower and a backup RAID drive out of it. The problem is that sometimes overnight it seems to fail and we can't figure out why. We can tell from the other computers and electronics in the office that we are not losing power overnight, so it seems to be a problem with the backup itself. When we get here in the morning, everything connected to it is off and the backup is making rather annoying, high frequency tone. Are we putting too much into the backup? Is there something mechanically wrong with it? Has this ever happened to you? Appreciate the help! Thanks!

-merc

[BillP]

i'd start by looking at something like the SUA1000


http://www.apc.com/resource/include/techspec_index.cfm?base_sku=SUA1000

[BillP]

hi,

well - as you said, this can only handle about 200 watts. it seems clear to me that you are overloading the UPS. just a guess - are you running your backups overnight with this? maybe the wattage draw is going up overnight and overloading the UPS when its turning on/pulling a lot of power.

when you come in, is everything powered down? what LEDs do you see flashing just so we can confirm my above suspicion? have you ever witnessed this work successfully and the UPS provide back up power to your devices?

this UPS is designed for minimal loads (maybe one AVERAGE PC or an alarm clock, phone, DVR, etc) and i definitely dont recommend it for your setup. you probably want to look at a minimum of a Back UPS RS with more power but even probably consider a Smart UPS. i'd see if you can find out the wattage requirements on all your devices, which may be written on them some place, and then we can see what UPS is appropriate for you.

[Anonymous user]

Yeah, that's kind of is what I thought was the case. It seemed like we were overloading it a bit. So do you have a suggestion for what we should get? I really don't know the difference between Smart UPS and Back UPS or anything. I'm not sure about the wattage spec on our devices either. We want to have a Mac G5 Tower, and MAXX RAID 8TB drive, and 17" Monitor plugged into the battery backup. Any thoughts? And thanks for the response, Angela! Very helpful!

[Anonymous user]

It doesn't need to be in a rack, we have an open shelving system since we move things in and out a lot here.

And I think as long as we were protected for enough time for us to be able to save and shut down properly in the case of a power outage, we'd be okay. Maybe just 5 minutes or so to be safe? Is that even possible for that much wattage? I guess in total probably about a kilowatt or a more?

[BillP · Accepted solution]

by from what I've googled, the power supply in that PC could be either 450-600 watts. a Back UPS is more designed for a home PC rather than a server class PC that you are describing. a Smart UPS has a faster transfer time to battery and outputs a pure sine wave on battery (rather than a step approximated sine wave) which both of those items are things that some server class machines have problems with. Smart UPS also have more LEDs on the front for information and all of the outlets on them are surge and battery back up.

Also, what type of runtime are you looking for on this and do you need to mount this in a rack?