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Common misconceptions regarding UPS |
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Most people do not fully understand how important UPS are, how expensive or how to use and take advantage of them. Some common place misconceptions:
A UPS will run lots of equipment UPS are powerful pieces of equipment and provide an important service, however they are built for specific purposes. UPS are sized according to the amount of equipment they can support at any one time. This figure is represented in VA or Volts Amps. The amount they can protect can be as small as 300VA and as large as 1,000,000VA, obviously the more protection you want the more it will cost. Every differnt piece of electronic equipment consumes an amount of power when operating, this can and will vary depending on what that peice of equipment is currently doing. For example, a computer in idle mode will use less power than when it is accessing its hard disk drives. For example, the average desktop workstation consumes approximately 250-300VA of electricty. A server will consume more - approximately 600-1000VA depending on the type. So if you want to protect a simple workstation you will need a UPS that is rated at at least 301VA. If you put more equipment on the UPS and the load exceeds 300VA then the UPS will overload and stop functioning. Contact us for more information.
UPS will backup equipment for many hours Each UPS comes with an internal battery. Even the best batteries on the market can store a finite amount of energy. The more backup time you want with a specific amount of equipment the more batteries you need. This cannot be avoided using current battery technology. As such, you cannot run for example a workstation or server for 8 hours on a small UPS. You can barely run a workstation or server for 1 hour on a small UPS let alone 8 or 24 hours. Long backup times can be achieved however using the right equipment (namely more batteries) but it won't come standard. If you want long run times you should ask when getting a quote. Contact us for more information.
UPS will protect against powerful spikes Although UPS do come with surge protection and as such are often promoted as surge protectors, they don't come with much. In most cases in the event of a power spike the UPS will stop the surge damaging its protected equipment by sacrificing itself. In this way it achieve's the goal of providing surge protection unfortunately at its own expense. Keeping this in mind and especially where there is a resonable amount of money invested in UPS equipment, it's a good idea to supplement a UPS with a purpose built Surge Protector. Surge protectors are reasonably low cost and will protect both your UPS and computer/electrical equipment from very high level surges very reliably. Visit here for some common surge protectors or call us for more information.
They are all the same Here at Alpha we often hear the phrase "...a UPS is just a UPS - they're all the same..." but the simple truth of the matter is that they're not. A UPS manfuacturer will have on average 30-40 different models of UPS each providing different supporting capacity, sinewave output, base technologies and each comes with its own array of options. That's why it's important when trying to pick the right UPS to ask a professional. Contact us for more information. |
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