Hello,
I have been owning an APC Back-UPS BX1600MI for a little under two years and have been encountering issues with it recently: the battery failed in August, I had to RMA and the replacement one is stuck on battery power while plugged to the mains since last night.
From what I gathered online, this model is plagued with issues, so I’m looking for another one.
My requirements are:
- Purchasable in the EU
- Has a variant with FR or DE plugs
- Can be monitored with NUT over USB or Ethernet
- At least 900VA capacity but if I can get the same capacity as currently (1600VA) for about 200€ I would
Thanks a lot!
EDIT: The UPS is fine, it turns out my street’s transformer had an issue and only provided 135V instead of the expected 230V, which means that the UPS was on battery for a valid reason. What lead me to believe that the UPS was at fault was that every other appliances seemed to work fine.
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At least 900VA capacity
Just being pedantic here, but VA is a power rating, not a capacity rating. A UPS has both a power rating that tells you how much power it can deliver at any given moment and a capacity that tells you for how long it can do so.
Can be monitored with NUT over USB or Ethernet
NUT has a hardware compatibility list.
For home use (and small uses at work) I’ve found cyberpower to be cheaper than APC and yet work as well. You’d likely need to get a model with a network card option, and that’ll cost more I think. I’m not in EU though, so IDK what model would meet your needs and price point (which seems pretty low to me for a network enabled UPS).
I have older 1500VA FSP UPS, I don’t think that exact model is available anymore, but it’s been solid for several years. It currently has 3rd or 4th set of batteries and they are standard bulk batteries, so replacements are easy to find from anywhere. Only problem I’ve had with that is that on display it doesn’t give out clear warnings when batteries degrade and it has crashed my system few times in a power outage, but I’ve been lazy and didn’t bother to properly monitor it nor have scheduled battery replacements, so that’s mostly on me.
Eaton seems to be pretty solid too, but I don’t have a ton of experience on any of their models. Local suppliers had dirt cheap PowerWalker UPS’s a few years ago, but one of them didn’t survive when battery died, so maybe I got what I paid for. Those worked fine too, but apparently they cooked the carging circuit when battery degraded.
This is of course just my own experience over a few models, but personally I wouldn’t spend my money on APC. Propietary batteries and multiple failures after battery replacement at work few years back were enough to choose something else.
My apc unit has a standard battery that has a replacement from Duracell, which model(s) have proprietary batteries?
My experiences are few years old, so I don’t remember excact models anymore, but some back-ups models (es series rings a bell, but as I said, it’s been a while) had batteries with soldered connectors and form-factor which (at least at the time) wasn’t available from anyone else than APC.
Mines at least that as well, it’s good to know come next ups purchase as I would hate to get stuck with that kind of garbage. I’ll have to pay close attention to the battery now when searching
The only proprietary battery thing I’ve come across using APC for decades was a connector that combined two standard batteries. It was attached to them and bound them together with stickers and connected to the terminals of each with normal terminal connectors. I just bought 2 standard replacement batteries and put the adapter on them. It all fit right back in and ran like new.
Might be worth looking around if you can find a used Eaton enterprise model locally, they’re much better quality than APC and similar ones.
