On Sun, 29 Jul 2018 18:50:13 +0100, Tim Watts
wrote:

On 29/07/18 18:45, Scott wrote:
On Sun, 29 Jul 2018 14:27:55 +0100, Tim Watts
wrote:

On 29/07/18 14:00, Scott wrote:
On Sun, 29 Jul 2018 13:49:58 +0100, Tim Watts
wrote:

On 29/07/18 12:31, Scott wrote:
On Fri, 27 Jul 2018 09:10:25 +0100, Tim Watts
wrote:

Hi,

Who makes good domestic UPSes these days? Looking for about 500VA (need
to put a power meter in to be sure) and 30 mins runtime.

But it's more about which make and possibly series are any good?

Would like a decent output too (proper sinusoidal).

Sorry, a basic question. Do these devices detract from energy
efficiency? If leaving stuff on stand-by is frowned upon, is a UPS
not even worse?



Don't care

Well, I do. I'm not spending any of my time trying to set up an
energy efficient home only to have it undone by one appliance.

I was hoping for an answer to my question.


Well, yes - to some extent it will add a degree of inefficiency. That's
unavoidable with any UPS.

The question is:

How do you value a small waste cost vs unavailable or possibly damaged
IT equipment due to frequent power losses?

APC's SmartUPS 1000 claims 97% efficiency.

Let's be uncharitable and say a typical UPS is 90% and your IT load is
100W (that's a lot, an HP Microserver Gen8 is quoted at 50W - so I am
adding a switch, modem and HA embedded controller.

Your wastage there would be 10W.

At 15p/unit that is 3.6p/day or £13/year.

In over half the year, that heat is probably not wasted (contributing to
home heating).

If the APC get's better than 95%, halve the above.

It's a very small number in the grand scheme of things.

Thanks very much. This allows me to assess the pros and cons.

My thinking is not to install a UPS since power cuts are very
infrequent here (all supply wiring underground). Also, I have a
dedicated radial circuit for the computer and all circuits have
individual RCBOs so a fault inside the property should not affect the
supply to the computer. I'm not doing anything very out of the
ordinary and Windows 10 generally seems to recover well.


I apologise for my dismissive tone earlier - instinctively I knew it was
a small number but no way anyone else might assume that.

It's fine. We all send stuff in a rush - that's the nature of social
media.

And in this case, the problem of frequent power cuts is a bigger issue
to me.

My impression is that power cuts are far more common in areas with
overhead cabling than in urban areas where the cabling is underground
and old. My brother used to live in a village and regularly had power
cuts. I'm in a 100 year old flat where power cuts are very rare.
Certainly, in your position I would adopt your approach.