Hello
Currently I have an APC 750 UPS that powers my data rack. It’s probably undersized and it uses lead acid batteries. What other UPS manufactures are there that people recommend. I’ve read a response about the Ecoflow product line but I’m not sure if it’s a true UPS. Here’s my requirements:
1.) I’d like it to use Lithium Ion battery’s for weight and longevity.
2.) Rack mountable - not a deal breaker
3.) Integrate with Home Assistant
4.) Remote notification of power outages and the ability to perform a graceful shut down.
5.) Support up to 500 watts or more
Thanks for the info. If I understand the technology, I have to have a NUT running on a machine and the UPS outputs information to the NUT server. I don’t have a NUT server, would I install one on the same machine as my HA?
And generally don’t be too concerned about exact model numbers. At the level you are looking at, I would expect anything new from manufacturers already listed would likely be compatible. Still, google and return policies are your friend.
Thanks for the updates. I looked up NUT on YouTube and watch a video that gave me the imprecision I has to install a separate NUT Server. The video was at least 2 years old. But now all I need to do is run the “Network UPS Tools” addon. I’d like to be able to get a Lithium Ion UPS for weight and battery longevity, however the price point of these might make it expensive vs the lead acid batteries. Don’t know without looking. I’m hoping for a 10 year life span which might be the range of the Lithium and would require 1 or 2 changes of the lead acid batteries over the course of the UPS’s life.
EDIT: yes, I see you mentioned in requirement 4 you want it to perform a graceful shutdown.
You forgot probably the most important requirement, what do you want the UPS to do and for how long? If you are looking for a stop-gap just to keep things running until a secondary power source comes online, then you probably only need a small UPS that can run for 3-5 minutes such as a 750VA UPS for a 500W load. If you are looking for a longer time solution you probably are entering the realm of rackmount systems that are 1500VA-2000VA which can provide 45+ minutes of power in extended outage scenarios or to allow devices to properly and gracefully sequence shutdown quickly. a UPS is not designed to run for an extended period of time. If you are looking for long runtime, you need to look into a secondary power source and transfer switch.
Personally I have 2 1500VA UPS’s. is it overkill? maybe, but it’s what i have accumulated over the years and have repurposed for different things. one runs my NAS and then commands the NAS to shutdown after 10 minutes of runtime. But I have a theoretical runtime of about 48 minutes. The other runs my network equipment and security camera NVR in a similar setup shutting down after 10 minutes of runtime with a theoretical runtime of about 51 minutes. Both use SLA (Sealed Lead Acid) batteries and I get about 4 years life expectancy out of them before needing to be replaced which is typical. Yes a lithium battery may have a longer lifespan, but you need to weigh that with the cost of replacement and capabilities.
Can confirm 1500W UPS on Rack Containing Unifi UDM-SE +various interconnect, Pi, etc. ~50 min runtime on outage. I shoot for anything from 45-90 min and fire the shutdown events at 5 in remaining. It gives about 2-3 min headroom before the power drops.
How does the UPS physically interface with the NUT server? I’m running HAOS on a Proxmox virtual machine. If I look at the CyberPower products I believe I can connect it to my IoT network via a LAN cable and them I presume there’s a setting in the NUT addon that will allow me to input the IP address of the UPS?
This is out of scope but thought I would float it as an alternative.
If you are interested in a whole house solution, you can look at the Tesla powerwall. I have 26.5kW of power, and it carries me overnight when solar is not available. It automatically switches to battery when line power goes down. Two batteries will cost about 20-25K.
oof - OK I have mine direct connected to a pi in the rack. That’s one option.
The trick is HA cant be the thing that sends the command to ProxMox to shut down if HA itself is in the VM - (without some interesting timing gymnastics) because it will send the command and PM will do what its told - maybe before the HA box is done downing itself.
I know with most VM platforms the add-ins handle this but Im not quite familiar enough with how PM and HA interact at that level (maybe someone who knows can help). but in essence, if you tell the HA box to shut down on the power event, then its no longer there to tell Proxmox to shutdown and when power dies PM has a bad time. (possibly taking out other things, so you didn’t meet your goal)
A small vm running nut on Linux could do it. It could be monitored by HA which will see the NUT box as a manageable node. So HA shuts itself down at say 7 min remaining, (Just give enough time to ensure it’s completely down) then NUT sends the remote shutdown to PM after enough time elapses, then the VM running NUT just dies when PM kills it. But at least HA is down and PM shuts down gracefully?
I use APC at home - 1000kvas, because they’re cheap second hand and easy to re-battery.
At work, we moved from APC to Eaton, which are better priced and very well built - we had a bunch of APC failures due to poor components. They need an additional nic module, but once that’s in the SNMP information is pretty solid. I can’
t recall the sizes, but they’re big. Two 4u’s power one rack with a pretty hungry cluster, and a single 4u runs a less hungry rack. Battery replacement is a little more involved than apc - we did one of them which contained 16x 12v slas in nothing much worse than a plastic blister pack - that’s some pretty scary voltages to be playing around with. But generally we like them, and they’ve been very reliable and seem to be kinder to batteries than the APCs.
I’ve also used Cyberpower at home, but had 2 fail before they were 3 years old and won’t buy them again.
I will echo what the other responses are saying, APC (for bigger needs) and CyberPower (for smaller stuff, because you can buy them at Costco, with Costco warrantee return ability) with NUT for monitoring and control. If my reading of the stats of the replies is correct and from my small experiment with bluetti LiFePO4 (Lithium Iron Phosphate) stuff, I would not give up on the ‘good old’ lead acid based solutions.
Thanks all for the responses. Nathan thanks for the heads up on the NUT, Promox Etc. So now the question becomes do I buy a RP simply to install NUT or do I buy a dedicated device for HA and if so which one? Perhaps the better answer would be to have HA on a dedicated machine in the first place!
