UPS Advice

[Bernie]

Hi

I have 4 PC's in my home office, 2 servers and 2 desktop PC's. I want to put them all on UPS. Do I have to buy a separate UPS for each PC, or can I connect more than 1 PC to a UPS. I am clueless when it comes to this sort of stuff. I see you get different ratings for UPS's soem are 400VA some 600VA what does this mean. What things should I be looking out for when getting a UPS.

Many Thanks in advance.

Forgot to add: My budget is around +/- R2000 for this, is this sufficient to meet my requirements.

 

[kenironside]

You don't need a seperate UPS for each PC. As lomg as they are in the same place (i.e. you can get a power cord to each of them from one place) then it's much better and more economical to buy one UPS for all of them. You can then connect then via a multi-plug.

The first question is about what exactly you want. Do you want to be able to continue to work on all four PC's when the power goes down (and for how long?). Or do you just want to have enough time to shut everything down gracefully?

The answer to this will determine the capacity you will need. However, with your R2000 budget, the best you can get is 10-15 minutes to shut down gracefully.

Typically, a PC with screen will draw between 300 & 500VA (ordinary PC + Screen = 350VA, newer P4 with fancy graphics = 450VA. LCD screens are less). So you will need a UPS sized between 1400 and 2000 VA (4 x 350 = 1400VA, 500 x 4 = 2000VA). Like hard disks, you can never have enough capacity and having too little is a pain.

I have a 2000VA UPS running 3 servers (no screens), 1 PC, printer, scanner, and a laptop and it never goes above 60% of capacity. Typically, this UPS will deliver enough power to run this setup for about 15-20 minutes. If I shut down some of the PC's then I get more time on the remaining PC's.

This company http://www.powerman.co.za/index.php gives some useful information and I can recommend them in terms of quality of product and backup. I think your budget may be light a little but not much. I can't recall what I paid for a 2000VA UPS but it wasn't more than R3k.

You'll see reference to off-line and on-line UPS's on this site - off-line works fine for me and if you want the on-line type you will pay much more.

Regards, Ken

 

[Bernie]

Thanks for the info Ken. I really need something that will give me 15-20 mins to shut everything down. I can live with only the 2 servers being on the UPS, the Desktop PC's are probably more of a nice to have than a neccesity since they off a lot of the time anyway. With the last set of power failures (East Rand) my firewall/proxy crashed, and my "File server" I want to protect aswell. We also seem to get very quick power failures just a quick on and off, so I also want to protect against those, they really stuff everything, I'm sure it trashed my decoder aswell.

I will check out the link you sent. If I have to spend a bit more then so be it I would rather have a working solution than a cheap one.