Which UPS to buy?

Hardware
1

Hi All,

I would like to setup a UPS to feed my Raspberry PI and router so I can get a message in my phone if power at home is down.

Which cheap UPS can do this? I guess it needs to be compatible with the NUT sensor?

Can you give me some examples from your setups?

Thank you in advance.
Best regards,

Marcos.

2

These are what I use…

The issue is that “cheap” and “compatible with NUT” are mutually-exclusive since the remote power monitoring features are usually only in the higher end UPSes.

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3

I have an Eaton 5S 850W which keeps my HA server, network switch and access points up for about 15 minutes.
Connects via USB to your HA server and is compatible with NUT.

https://www.eaton.com/au/en-gb/catalog/backup-power-ups-surge-it-power-distribution/eaton-5s-ups.html

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4

I have 2 UPS’s from Cyberpower. Both are working with NUT but need a tweak as NUT has a timeout feature and the Cyberpower UPS’s usually report just over that timeout (or something along those lines).

The 2 I have are the Value2200ELCD (connected to a Pi3) and the BR850ELCD (connected to a PiZeroW). Both are working flawlessly.

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5

Thank you all for your help! Very appreciated :slight_smile:

6

Probably I will go for the 850 as I only need to keep up the raspberry pi and the router so I can send a Telegram message to my phone when there is an electricity cut.

I maybe will also add some battery pack for phones so I can keep it always connected to my Google Home speaker and get also a spoken notification to wake me up.

Cheers!

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7

And I use APC 700 with apc addon

8

only 85 EUR and I can use the daemon here: https://www.home-assistant.io/components/apcupsd/ with an old raspberry PI as a server.

Unless I can connect it by USB directly to the Rasberry PI with HA and use that APC Addon you mentioned, that would be great.

Thanks!

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10

Did you have to do any configuration to get the Eaton 5S working? Can you share your config details?

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In HA I am just using the UI-based configuration (or I think it was automatically migrated from the YAML config). And these are the entities I get automatically based on my selection:

eaton5s
eaton5s672Ă—1438 64.4 KB

NUT itself runs on the same host as HA, so HA can access it via localhost:3493.

Is NUT itself running fine on your host? Which part of the overall configuration of the UPS with HA are you currently struggling with?

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12

The steps I followed:

  1. Configuration → Integrations → Add Integration
  2. Search for “NUT”
  3. Click on “Network UPS Tool (NUT)”
  4. Prompted to enter hostname, port, login, and password
  5. Responded with “localhost”, “3493” (the default), MyUserID, MyPassword
  6. Received a “Failed to connect” error.

I have the Eaton 5S plugged into the RPi on which I am running HA with the USB cable provided by Eaton. I did not install any software on the RPi for Eaton.

I checked the 5S on my laptop by plugging the 5S into my laptop using the USB cable and installing the Eaton sw on my laptop. This worked just fine.

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13

The NUT integration only works when the UPS is integrated into NUT on the host it’s connected to via USB. You will need to install NUT on your RPi and configure it to talk to your UPS.

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14

Try to get a UPS which you can change the battery yourself. Otherwise in 2-3 years you have to buy a new UPS instead of spending 10 USD for a new battery. I have 2 APC BX950, although APC says you cannot change the battery, it is fairly easy to do it…

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15

Ah. Should I, can I, install NUT on the RPI running HA using SSH, or should I install NUT on a different RPi running raspOS?

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16

There is a NUT add-on which you could try.

I personally run HA in Docker (Home Assistant Container) on Ubuntu Linux and have just installed the nut package manually.

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17

Much appreciated. That is exactly the advice I needed. I do not know why the documentation does not describe this.

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