Eaton UPSs - EOL Evolution vs 5P?

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SumnerBoy

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#1293142 28-Apr-2015 21:06

I have decided to go the cheap option to start with - I am sure I will be back here in a few months and you can all say 'I told you so' but for 1/3 the cost I am prepared to give the Dynamix 1200VA model a go and see how it plays out. Hopefully I can get nut talking to it...

chevrolux

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#1293156 28-Apr-2015 21:40

It will work fine (the UPS, don't know about Nut) but get yourself a few batteries on standby because you WILL be replacing them within a year or so.

SumnerBoy

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#1295097 1-May-2015 15:31

For those interested I received the Dynamix Defender 1200VA and have hooked it up. I have installed nut on my Ubuntu server and it is working pretty well. The UPS itself (or perhaps the driver) doesn't report the battery charge level, just the voltage. So after charging it over night it was sitting stable at 27.6V and I have guestimated the low voltage cutoff to be 20.0V. As nut is monitoring the UPS it will estimate the battery charge and will send the SHUTDOWN command when it gets to 20% - i.e. about 21.5V.

I just tested this by unplugging the UPS from the mains and letting it run down. It took just over 90mins for the battery to drain to a point where nut decided it was time to power down. My server was still running fine up until that point. There was enough juice for the server to shutdown cleanly and my modem/router remained powered up (they are on the other sockets).

All-in-all I am pretty happy with the system. Using nut and openHAB I get email/Pushover/Tweet notifications when the UPS state changes; i.e. "UPS on battery", "UPS battery is low", "Auto logout and shutdown proceeding", meaning I am well informed of what is going on if away from home.

Interested to know what others thoughts are re. low battery voltage. I know it is not an accurate measure but according to the UPS itself, with my server and modem/routers connection, it is running at about 10% load, so I am wondering if I can afford to let the battery drain a little more?

Probably going to leave it as is however, happy with 90 mins.

SumnerBoy

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#1299924 7-May-2015 15:12

For anyone interested, here is the openHAB page I have for monitoring the UPS;

I am sure with a more expensive model I would have a load more parameters to monitor, like battery level/charge/remaining time etc, but for $180 I am pretty happy. I will get some failover protection for power surges/brownouts and should get well over an hour of up time if there is a black out.

Thanks everyone for your comments/tips/suggestions.

zapped

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#1307421 18-May-2015 19:27

Thanks Ultimate Geek for all the great info...!

I too bought that particular Dynamix unit and didn't want to use the-provided (heavy) application. So I was delighted when I saw that someone else had already gone before me in this matter…

I've spent some 3rs now trying to install a suitable driver from the NUT site but haven't managed to get even the (manually-installed) libusb file to install.

Would you kindly post links to the files that you used to get your system communicating with the UPS please?

Thanks!

Regards, Paul

SumnerBoy

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#1307496 18-May-2015 20:50

Hey Paul,

This is the config I have in my ups.conf file;

[ups]
driver = blazer_usb
port = auto
desc = "Dynamix Defender 1200VA"
default.battery.voltage.high = 27.6
default.battery.voltage.low = 20.0

Pretty sure it was all included in the nut install, i.e. no extra drivers installed.

Good luck!
Ben

Lenovo

Shop now for Lenovo laptops and other devices (affiliate link).

zapped

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Wannabe Geek

#1307749 19-May-2015 12:39

Thanks for the super-fast response Ben!

I further experimented in the early hours this morning but still without success, so I rolled back the sys image (Macrium Reflect) and installed the latest version of NetGuard. It actually doesn't weigh heavily on the sys (checking with System Explorer)--I was pleasantly surprised, it looks very capable, and at first experimentation--does seem to handle shutting down very cleanly while providing excellent feedback. So unless I experience issues with it in the future, I'm quite comfortable with this. For a sizable program--it really does seem to be pretty light on resource.

Thanks so much for your help Ben--very much appreciated… Thanks also to everyone else who contributed to this post. Geekzone is a top quality resource and even better for being local.

All the best,

Paul

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