Thanks guys. I'm wondering how long the battery should last in the UPS before it hits end of life. The APC seems (from the LCD) to be okay. The worry is it doing the 'relay' turn on for a 2-3 minutes every so often which is when it gets noisy, I'm not sure if this is considered normal operation on the APC Smart UPS 750? I was originally thinking it was a self test cycle of some sort, but if it is no indication is shown concerning this on the LCD.
UPS Power Monitor I use on the Mac reads the UPS info from the NAS as per below. Anyone any ideas if that looks healthy?
I’ve read that the intermittent sound might be because the UPS is encountering “dirty electricity” and it needs to condition it. Not sure how to check for that.
You might try moving it to a different outlet (just for testing), preferably loaded on a different breaker if possible, stress load it and see if it still emits the sound.
You can also try washing the electricity before is goes through the UPS to make sure it’s “clean electricity” and see if the sound goes away
I hate dealing with electricity. So any (or all) of the above might not make any sense. Be careful
Interesting I'd not thought of that angle. The UPS is on the separate ring main which supplies power to the dining room / office, so alas no chance of trying a different breaker.
Look, you know that you want a new UPS. Don’t prolong this, just get a new UPS
Just in case. There was another thread about people who almost got killed by their spouses for things they bought. They provided good tips and “lessons learned”. You might want to take a look at that (and streamline your approach) before you pull the trigger.
Good luck and congratulations on your new UPS. May the “clean electricity” be with you.
I have made the switch to CyberPower. Reason is cost, especially for a networked UPS and PDU, and they're compatible with synology. I can now shut down multiple devices (using network) if the power goes out. I also created reverse proxies to the UPS & PDU management pages, so its quick and easy to access remotely. Their sales guys have been awesome as well.
Thanks guys. I'm wondering how long the battery should last in the UPS before it hits end of life. The APC seems (from the LCD) to be okay. The worry is it doing the 'relay' turn on for a 2-3 minutes every so often which is when it gets noisy, I'm not sure if this is considered normal operation on the APC Smart UPS 750? I was originally thinking it was a self test cycle of some sort, but if it is no indication is shown concerning this on the LCD.
UPS Power Monitor I use on the Mac reads the UPS info from the NAS as per below. Anyone any ideas if that looks healthy?
1. the UPS monitor based on NUT running on the NAS is simple provider of UPS firmware status. There isn’t useful healthy information from your UPS: last battery cycle charge to % of the official capacity, ... But there us one indicator of unhealthy status “battery.voltage” vs “batterry.voltage.nominal” = in your case 27.3V vs 24V. When I take into consideration, that the battery is fully charged, then your battery has one of the indicators for the end of lifespan. You can switch off then on the UPS and check the voltage again, for sure.
2. reason why you don’t have more info about the battery conditions = it’s entry level UPS
3. what is interesting for me is “battery.low.charge=10” and “ups.delay.shutdown=20”. The first means, that your NAS will enable DSM Safe mode, when the UPS will reach last 10% of capacity = dangerous. And the UPS will shutdown itself 20seconds from reaching the Low.charge.
Then, when you have setup in DSM, that Safe mode = battery low, you will get troubles:
- not enough time for the Safe mode = 10% is too tricky for a time of discharge
- when the event of the outage will repeat within hour, you will get Battery On mode again, but uncharged batteries will be discharged faster. Then 40% is quite better include 60seconds for the Shutdown.
OFC then you need calculate the amount of the batteries power for such scenario.
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the “dirty” energy, also called a Reactive power is really dirty, because it needs to be created, distributed but it’s not consumed efficiently in such device. Then when the Power plant is based on coal, we have troubles.
Yes there are some small black boxes, called Reactive power compensation for households, but it’s more sales driven than efficiency in their job. Because for the efficiency in this case you need dynamic Reactive power compensator what cost over 4k Eur for medium house.
Btw: in another cases, you can’t start AC engines w/o the Reactive power
@WST16 I'm lucky that my good lady is okay with us getting a new UPS when needed.
@Gerard Yet another vote for Cyberpower, seems to be the way to go.
@jeyare I do have two APC UPS's, the Smart UPS 750 but also the larger capacity 1500 model would you consider both as entry level UPS?
The UPS's are reporting the batteries should be changed out in July for the 750 and September for the 1500 so yes I guess that degrading of the battery you mention is part of that process.
Concerning point 3) there is not a lot I can change there (as I'm using a Mac the Powerchute software is not available for me to change any of the settings on the UPS) so the only thing I can change is on the NAS where I can set a time before the disksation enters Save Mode - what setting would you suggest I enter in here?
I don't do this way as I use an APC UPS with my Mac and want macOS to manage via System Preferences. And I haven't tested how easy it is to switch apcupsd on/off without affecting the builtin support.
Install in a virtualised Linux and grab the USB port:
Create a Linux VM using your preferred flavour (I already had a Raspbian VM I was playing with)
Use apt-get to install apcupsd
Assign the UPS's USB interface to the VM
Option 2 is my way of doing this and driven from the desire to disable that annoying alarm. Once configured I shutdown the VM and the Mac takes over monitoring the UPS. I also setup the UPS that I use with the NAS.
it's not about capacity, it's about type of used batteries, inverter and controlled firmware. In APC Smart range there are SMT, SUA, SMX ... each of them have same capacity, different features, upgradeability (batteries replacement), ... but most important is for me the batteries power draw table (a curve of the usable power in time on batteries):
Concerning point 3) there is not a lot I can change there (as I'm using a Mac the Powerchute software is not available for me to change any of the settings on the UPS) so the only thing I can change is on the NAS where I can set a time before the disksation enters Save Mode - what setting would you suggest I enter in here?
So, I spent several hours with discovering of this: 1. Each DSM contains a feature "Synology UPS server" you can setup it by Control panel/Hardware & Power/UPS/Network UPS Type + Enable UPS Server it can helps you to manage another NASes connected to your LAN as the Synology UPS server 2. Then...
@fredbert - With both apcupsd and the linux option those would need the UPS to be plugged into the Mac via the USB port? That is not an option I want to go with as the primary purpose is for it to protect the NAS.
@jeyare Script files........ not my fave tool (yeah I know). I'll save the article for later reading and implementation consideration.
I did suffer a 20 minute power outage a week or so ago (very rare) and the NAS did go into (and out of) safe mode and the Mac did shut down so it did work.
@fredbert - With both apcupsd and the linux option those would need the UPS to be plugged into the Mac via the USB port? That is not an option I want to go with as the primary purpose is for it to protect the NAS.
It was a way to configure the UPS, similar to how you noted that Powerchute for accessing settings is only PC. After that I shutdown the VM and plug the UPS into the NAS.
