[Tfug] UPS sizing

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 09:16:59AM -0800, Bexley Hall wrote:
>
>Rather, it seems like I'm better served by a small
>UPS at each machine that is just big enough to
>provide an orderly shutdown (saving work in progress)
>in the event of a power outage (and, to tide me over
>in those occasional dropouts).
>
>Does this seem in line with what others have done?

I've been very happy with the UPS I purchased.  I never needed one in Tucson.
Living on the far East side of town (Houghton & 22nd), there was perhaps one
short outage per year.  In Massachusetts, however, I was living in a 115 year
old house with wiring from Edison's original company and phone connections in
the basement from the original Bell Telephone.  The landlord strongly
suggested I purchase a UPS.

I have a APC BackUPS 700 and I've got everything running off of it: cable
modem, wifi switch, Mythbox/file server, tiny TV speakers, desktop PC, LCD
panel, laptop, Wii, and a few various bits (chargers, etc.).  Even with all of
that equipment, the UPS is only at about 45% capacity which gives me a runtime
of approximately 15 minutes.  These are values reported by NUT (Network UPS
Tools).

As a side note, when I replaced my previous Mythbox/file server, an AthlonXP
2200 system with three drives and an external DVD, with a new machine, an
Athlon64 X2 5200 with three larger drives and an internal DVD drive, I found
that the idle power consumption dropped by three percentage points (again, as
reported by NUT).  I'm sure a big part of that is due to the fact that the old
Athlon chip had no frequency scaling whereas the new chip can move between
2.7GHz and 1.0GHz.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
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