UPS: Connected
It’s been a few months since I collected Grog’s old UPS, but finally Baz the electrician was able to come around and put a 15amp circuit on for me. Our garage now sports a pair of 15amp sockets, on their own 32amp RCD, and overall the whole thing didn’t cost me that much (the final bill’s still waiting, we’ll get that with the safety certificate). We had some other work done at the same time, like the single socket behind Sabriena’s desk removed and a larger one installed so we no longer need to run long power strips from around the corner. But anyway, this entry is about the UPS.
Overall the install went fairly smoothly. Our old switchboard (breaker box for the US folks) caused a bit of grief, given that it uses bus bars with bottom-fed breakers (so power on the main breaker comes in the top, goes out the bottom, then there’s a piece of steel shaped like a very coarse comb which feeds into the bottom of the individual breakers, and then power goes out the top of them). Apparently they’re not done that way any more, and he had to take the whole bus bar out, cut the extra finger off the side of it, in order to use the one free space in the box, which added a bit of downtime.
Our old UPS kept everything but the server (which I powered off in anticipation) on the entire time, which was good. Unfortunately, I powered the server back on prematurely, not realizing that to change the outlet behind Sabriena’s desk, we would have to switch off power to it, and that the second living room where her desk is shares a circuit with the garage. The additional load of the server, combined with a mostly-drained battery meant that I emptied the battery in short order and the server shut off. It then caused me some grief getting it back on.
But to the new UPS: I connected it, it powered right up and stayed on. Let the batteries charge up, and then ran a battery test - they came back good. Since I had to power the server off after work because it didn’t come back up on the network, I ran an extension cord over to the new UPS and plugged it in there, so even though I haven’t moved the rack yet, the new UPS is powering the server (with all the network gear being on the 1500VA Cyberpower unit).
It seems pretty happy, and forecasts a runtime of 1 hour 15 minutes, which I would be more than happy if that’s accurate. I haven’t tested it, naturally, but we’ll see. The network gear is around 10~20% of the drain that the server is, so I don’t think moving all that over will affect things too much.
Now to set up some monitoring for it!
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