What UPS Battery Backup Do You Reconmend?

What battery backup do y’all recommend?
What about this?

CyberPower CP350SLG Standby UPS System, 350VA/255W, 6 Outlets, Compact https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OR0V2C/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_kfWpFb4C6KEDV

EDIT: I ended up getting this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FWAZEIU/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_api_i_PVWpFb

Please let me know if this will work just fine or not.

Or what about this?

Ayeway Power bank 26800mah portable charger with dual ports output,phone battery backup charger portable phone charger with visible LCD Screen,external charger for iPhone,Samsung Galaxy,ipad and More. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0823LTKL8/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_TzWpFbEMF0YB8

@gizmoev @eric @WFstaff @GaryFunk

Very few of these devices support pass-through charging (UPS function), and many of them shut off the battery power when they believe the attached device is “full” based on low current draw like the Hub’s extremely low power consumption…

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I ended up getting this:

Do you think it will work?

I bought one of these back in early June, to run my whole west wing :slight_smile: server room:

Even with two NAS units, my surround sound stereo, TiVo and tuning adapter, and all of the network and IoT stuff, it is only at 18% capacity and has a 30-minute runtime. It was battle-tested a few weeks ago when Tropical Storm Isaias knocked out our power for days, and was the only UPS in the house that kept on chugging away without complaining about our dirty portable generator power. The tiny little APC unit intended to keep a cable modem running kept clicking its transfer relay several times per minute, and the Cyber Power in the same basic layout as the one you linked kept on beeping and clicking its transfer relay until the battery went dead.

I’m very happy with the Eaton so far, and would definitely buy more…

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When I was at Boardwatch Magazine, Eaton sent us one of there HUGE units. It ran our entire server room and several hours.

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After having to deal with three 15-minute refueling generator shutdowns per day from the Isaias blackout, I was thinking about getting a whole-house-sized Eaton 8kVA to hold until we hook up the portable generator. After looking at the price, I started looking at the off-grid inverter options. There are a few out there for under $2K that have 240V outputs and internal logic to switch between multiple inputs like grid, solar, battery, and generator. This will probably be what I do, since the price should be more than half of a commercial UPS.

I don’t know if I ever mentioned it, but APC and I have a long history of failures and injuries. I was knocked across a wiring closet by a plasma flash through the front grate of a 6kVA APC UPS in meltdown once. In 2017, I had another 2200VA unit on the bench spontaneously short out its battery pack and “bite” me pretty bad:

The burns self-cauterized, and I didn’t even seek medical attention. Of course the fingerprint reader on my phone has been useless ever since, but I digress. Needless to say, I will not touch or spend a dime on another APC UPS.

A footnote on the generator is that our town taxes permanent standby generators as a luxury. Many of the cheaper residential standby generator options are air-cooled and run on natural gas, which we do not have in our neighborhood. I want to get a “portable” diesel generator, and drop a siphon line down our heating oil vent nozzle with a pump to fuel the generator. We could run for a few days off of the heating oil supply, and it isn’t taxable as long as it is on wheels and not wired directly to the house…

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Yes have had 2 APC units go bad rather quickly, and will never buy one again either.

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I keep looking at Generac. I really want one or ten.

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See my post above about “cheaper residential standby generator options” and do your homework carefully. If you read the reviews, Generac’s residential standby generators are air-cooled, and do not seem to be built with a 100% duty cycle (continuous running for days) at the top of the feature list.

I’m watching Craigslist for a Cummins/Onan diesel or RV setup, a military surplus trailer generator re-tuned from 25 Hz to 60 Hz, or something similar. What a shame that the EPA put a stop to importing slow-speed Lister diesel clones, because they can power a small house on less than half a gallon per hour:

Third-world solutions for America’s third-world power grid… :slight_smile:

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I use the following for an always on UPS.

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I’m so happy to live in the Netherlands where power outage is a very rare event (perhaps once every 3 years or so)

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I ended up cancelling my APC order and got this. Thank you!

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Wow that brings back memories of when I used to fly fish out of the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands. Some of the places where I picked up fish loads, that was all there was island wide was Lister gen sets. They go forever and run on fumes!! With that big flywheel the frequency is quite stable even when hit with a big inductive load like a large refrigeration compressor coming on line.

EPA has done more damage than good in my view, but that is just my view.

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the whole village knows when you start it … simple and robust but hell noisy :slight_smile:

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Spoken like someone who has not spent days with a 6.5kW portable generator running outside his bedroom window, Honda GX-390 knockoff revved out to 3,600 RPM. You can’t sleep, the entire neighborhood hates you, and they aren’t even welcome at most camp grounds. I actually have two of them, from the motorsports hobby that I was forced to retire from by the mean doctors. One ran the event computers, timers, and other electronics, and the other one was purchased to run the aircon unit in my race car hauler that I never got to install before my last hospital stay.

If you don’t need to run your entire house, Honda (and knockoffs) sell 1kW and 2 kW inverter generators that are quiet enough to run next to a timing/scoring table and still carry on normal conversations. Not cheap, but definitely neighbor-friendly in terms of noise.

Speaking of the Listers, I found out a few weeks ago that I missed an estate auction last spring just 3km from my house. Thanks to COVID and nobody showing up to competitively bid, someone left the auction with FIVE allegedly running, genuine made in the UK vintage Listers and a pile of spare parts for $25.00… :sob:

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I have one in my garage since we had to live 3 weeks off grid, noisy but also expensive to feed … since that event, solar panels for electricity (+ 600 Ah storage) and hot water on the roof, enough to power minimum in the house and generate hot water in a 530 gallon storage (can partly heat the house).
But these days power company just dumps a 100 KvA container down the street and it feeds the street and next to it you hear it hardly hum.

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This has been discussed at length in another thread…

Like someone said, a USB power bank works well but it must support always-on pass-through charging. I use this one and it works great.

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From the web page:
“After charging the unit for only 4 hours, you can recharge a USB device 2 times,”

That makes beyond zero sense.