[Nut-upsuser] couple questions about supported UPSes and politics of purchase

[Rob MacGregor]

On Jan 18, 2008 1:47 PM, Eric S. Johansson <esj at harvee.org> wrote:
> a customer of mine needs a UPS capable of supporting a small server in his
> office.  Obviously, nut is a good thing for him for clean shutdown etc.
> especially with the crappy quality power in his office condo.
>
> I wanted to purchase an MGE UPS but it looks like they purchased APC and are now
> flogging that product line.  Now, I've never been happy with APC.  I have an APC
> 3000 (sans batteries) sitting in the basement.  It worked but, it needs new
> batteries every 24 months and they get expensive.  (Note: if you're in the
> Boston area and you want it, make me a reasonable offer either in cash or
> equipment trade and it's yours.) And I had a little 350 unit for my wife's
> desktop which also ate batteries.  Contrast to the Belkin 1100 units I have
> running a couple servers and some switches in the basement.  They've worked
> really well with decent battery life.  I might even get brave enough to connect
> NUT to them this weekend.  :-)

I've got a pair of SOHO type units.  A little 650 VA Belkin unit,
that's ok (nothing special, but at that price I didn't expect anything
else) and an MGE Ellipse unit.  The MGE is a better unit, but the
internal fan is starting to fail (it sounds like dust-related
problems), I now have to work out if it's worth trying to/is possible
to replace the fan, or just replace the unit with one with out a fan.

Despite that, I'd still buy MGE-OPS over Belkin.  The units seem
better built and mine has been more reliable than my Belkin.  The fact
that they support open source is a major advantage IMO (yes, I'm
biased, have you tried the Belkin Bulldog software under Linux?).

Either way, you'll need to replace the batteries every few years.
Over time they degrade and stop holding any meaningful charge.  After
about 3-4 years my Belkin batteries only held about 2 seconds of
runtime (as I discovered when the power went out, the Belkin beeped
once and died).

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Rob MacGregor
      Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he
        doesn't become a monster.                  Friedrich Nietzsche