Re UPS Recommendation

["DavidC" <ukdavidc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Living in an area prone to power cuts and having purchased a  number
of UPSs
from Andy over the years for home and work I can add a recommendation of
him
as a supplier.



My setup (been like this for 7 years) is as follows:



I have an APC 3000VA tower UPS in the garage under a bench. My garage is
well insulated but not normally heated and this results in a good
environment, temp ranges from 10c to 20c and humidity is normally no higher
than 50%.   UPSs hate heat and I've found the batteries don't last anywhere
near as long if they are in warm equipment rooms.



My  UPS output is routed around my house and office with dedicated radial
circuits that terminate in bright red sockets labelled "UPS ONLY"
on the
walls (Easy to do as a selfbuild) The UPS powers all the TV and cinema
stuff, alarm, phone, PCs etc.  This works very well and if we have a power
cut it'll run everything for about 30 minutes, longer if I turn stuff off.



This gives me time to go to the garage and pull out my Kama suitcase
generator (from Ebay). This provides  an output that is smooth enough the
UPS will accept it as mains and switch back to normal mode. I put the
generator on the bench, open the window, although it's not noisy or too
smelly, and it "re-charges" the UPS whilst that continues to
supply the
house.



The 1Kw generator has worked fine works fine as the UPS load in "no
mains
power mode" is normally much less than 1Kw. Although for this winter
I'm
upgrading to a 3Kw generator so I can run a big fridge freezer at the same
time in the case of longer power cuts.



Finally, in our hall, we have a "power cut torch" This is a
rechargeable
torch plugged in to the mains that comes on automatically when mains power
goes off - this is useful at night although because the UPS powers most of
the screens there is normally enough light to see your way about when power
goes off.



One final benefit of the UPS, our mains voltage fluctuates a lot and is
normally very high (over 250v) causing more PSUs failures than normal but
the stuff on the UPS runs at 238v which can only be good.



David C





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



------------------------------------