[BC] Cyberpower brand UPS

[Glen Kippel]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 10:38 AM, <tpt at literock93r.com> wrote:

>
> Watch out for this brand of small UPS (they are sold at Office Depot).
>
> Needed something with 4 instead of 2 outlets just to float the
> satellite receivers and air monitors for a few seconds until our geni
> comes up when the power drops.  The XDS takes about 2 1/2 minutes  to
> reboot, the Wegener, 8 minutes +; rather silly to have a generator but
> be off the air because I am waiting for a satellite receiver to
> reboot.  So I picked up a CyberPower brand 450 VA unit to sit in the
> equipment rack.
>
> Yesterday --at 5:40 AM, a black snake crawled into the substation,
> killing power to the entire town. Or so the cover story goes. 3 phase
> power to us down until 11 AM.
>
> Generator came up (Onan 20 KW) and I switched over to our single-phase
> back-up (a Harris 2.5 K). About a half hour passes--and both satellite
> receivers dump.  Apparently the CyberPower does not like the AC out of
> the Onan genset, it refused to switch back from battery and just ran
> down. No problem with the half dozen APC units I have on the
> computers, exciter, Omnia processors, etc.
>
> Only two things comes to mind: A. The Onan's AC is not close enough to
> a sine wave to keep the Cyber Power happy (picky, picky!) or B. (more
> likely) voltage tolerances are way too tight.  Our usual line voltage
> floats around 217 to 220; the genset was made for 240.
>
> I bought another APC UPS, the CyberPower unit is going home to back up
> my home computer. Much less "mission-critical" use.
>
> ----------------

OK, I had this problem once when our Edison Company was moving a pole near
our transmitter site and brought up a genset to keep everybody up and
running.  Everything seemed to be OK until we went off the air.  I found
that the UPS that was keeping the gear going had run out of battery power.
(This was with a Best Power FerrUPS with the ERT-2 Extended Run Time option
to give about 2.5 hours of full-power on-air time in case of a power
failure.)  The genny was still running but not showing at the UPS,  I called
Best and they said that probably the generator was putting out something
like 58 Hz and the UPS didn't care for that.  The CS guy walked me through
the procedure of pulling off the cover and changing a DIP switch to widen
out the frequency acceptance range of the UPS and it came back up.  After
that I wired up a line from the UPS to the ARC-16 to give me an alarm when
we went to battery power.  I do reccomend the FerrUPS (now made by
Powerware) for those mission-critical things.  Otherwise, APC is pretty
good.  We have a Back-UPS XS 1300 here with a sweet little LCD display that
shows how much current is being sucked out of it, the expected run time,
etc.  I like having that kind of info.