 Tom here from Orange Systems and buying a UPS can be a little bit confusing people have been asking me questions about this and I said, you know, I rather just bring on someone I know that I actually friends with on LinkedIn and dealt with who knows how to do UPS is actually you do them like it data data center scale pretty frequently, right Jordan? Yep. Yep. I work with some pretty big monsters like one megawatt system Yeah, but he also understands even the ones that we may be putting in our smaller normal racks that don't require megawatts so we're gonna talk about selecting the size of the UPS and Just some of the different options in terminology So we have a source of truth so to speak because people will debate about that I'm like, well, I don't want to get I don't want to miss fake or say anything wrong That's why I have Jordan here as a subject matter expert because this is what he does day in day out is UPS is and when we've needed UPS is we've contacted Jordan. So that's that's what brought this all here like let's just put settle the debate down and talk about Specking one out. So and we have some slides here. Don't worry. It's not death by PowerPoint. I assure you It's just we need something to keep us on topic and talking about things and a few illustrations to bring up Yeah, thank you for the introduction Tom. Sorry. I got a street cat That's all right. That's all everyone does if you're in tech. There's a large Yeah, so UPS is a UPS the smallest to the largest they all have a lot of the same internals and a lot of same components So I think we can address some of the smaller systems and a lot of that's applicable to the bigger stuff, too Oh, yeah Appreciate as much the scale it's about determining which rate for you and what size you need on there And that's kind of what we're gonna be focusing on Correct, correct. Yeah, so I think we can go ahead and get started on the next slide when I'm ready So this one's pretty obvious the biggest reason to use a UPS is to avoid damage to your equipment To keep your stuff online for a long time any downtime can cost a ton of money I've seen instances where even 30 minutes of downtime can cost millions of dollars in terms of Data loss in terms of loss processing power So, you know, you'd be more familiar with with what downtime can call it Yeah And nobody wants to deal with it and you know it takes a while to reboot and bring everything back up and especially if you have database applications unexpected failures are Well, not pleasant to deal with is you have more checks that sometimes need to be done to ensure that there's proper integrity on there and Allow for safe shutdowns to avoid data loss. That is a Topic we're not gonna dive deeply into that's the requirement and I will leave a link to because he's done such a good job My friend Techno Tim has a whole video where he talks about all the methodologies of pulling data out of UPS is We're focusing on the UPS itself, but that video will be linked down below Yeah It's great and it starts about the other side of this because that's what people want to know is How do I get my UPS can like there's so many different ways and he covers a variety of the different data feeds from a Variety of different UPS is that we it's just it's like an hour-long video It's but Tim went went deep on this one to bring it to you It's entirely different video and it's entirely related, but important topic So let's go over some of the most common types of Utility failure you're gonna see so blackout is the one that's most famous That's when you lose your power and stuff shuts down, but we also have a few others There's ten common power issues that you're gonna see so you have blackout which is where you lose power power sag Which is where your your voltage drops below a Sufficient voltage for your equipment So let's say you've got a hundred twenty volts out of your outlet it might drop down to a hundred three volts and Sometimes some equipment can get upset over that in this instance power sag is just gonna be a short term term thing And then a brown out is kind of an extended power sag Voltage surges that would be where your your input voltage goes way too high Most UPS is actually almost all UPS is have something called a metal oxide varistor Built into it somewhere and what that does is it's a resistor that increases in resistance Exponentially as soon as a high voltage comes through so that's how most UPS is are going to deal with voltage surges Overvolt would be a continuation of too high of a voltage so Surge might be you know a thousand volts or a very high input voltage and overvolt it should be let's say you have 140 volts and you're supposed to have a hundred twenty volts and in this instance will say that that's a continued a Continued thing and that that can be common in Industrial environments in places where you got some more noise on your line and so can a lot of these other other ones That are coming up so normal mode noise that is noise between your line and neutral so it could be Just any sort of EMI noise that you'd see just from Equipment that just creates its own noise fluorescent lights can create their own noise all sorts of stuff can create their own noise frequency variation not a super common one, but Typically in the US we're gonna have 60 Hertz regardless of whether it's a hundred twenty volts or 240 volts or 208 volts 60 Hertz is the typical Nominal frequency that you're gonna see on your AC line Switching transients those are either spikes or drops in power When some big equipment comes on and it might might cause some some issues on the line that look like a surge or a drop in power And then you got harmonic distortion, which is where you've got some more EMI on the line and common mode noise So those are the 10 most common common mode noise is noise between your neutral and your ground The only way to get around that is to bond your neutral and ground on the output of an isolation transformer So these are kind of complicated, but we see a lot of these in the industrials Especially because on the starting and stopping of the machines is you'll see the voltage sags You'll see the you can you can notice it in the lights. That's where you go Hey, look the way you know, oh, they're starting the press again And once it starts up, you know our industrial clients That's like if they don't have UPS is it the power sags and the brownouts people don't realize the way they make modern switching power supplies They compensate for voltage But if the voltage goes too low and they spend too much time compensating they can get hot and damage Let the UPS handle it Exactly Yeah, and you can cause damage like you said a lot of switch mode power supplies are pretty resilient But yeah, you still want to have a UPS on there They have really pretty beefy Capacitors in them that can carry over for really short instances where you might have a dropout like a few milliseconds Maybe 30 40 milliseconds. I don't know exactly. Yeah enough to flick that switch When you're doing the switching modes on well, I think we'll talk about that towards the end at some point The box so you can bypass the UPS Yeah, exactly exactly So a big part of choosing UPS is determining what size of UPS you you need and it's pretty confusing because a lot of UPS manufacturers might only publish the VA and Or they might have you know this and you might say oh well, I've got a 1500 watt power supply So I must need a 1500 watt UPS Which might not necessarily be the case the most common way to size a UPS that I see for smaller UPS is Is just by nameplate rating. It's typically the least accurate The reason being is when you use a nameplate You're not actually determining your true load. So even though you might have a nameplate Power supply is capable of delivering 1500 watts if you're only using 600 watts continuously, you really don't need a 1500 watt UPS There's more accurate ways to to size a UPS You do want some overhead in some cases. Let's say you can hit that 1500 watt load Then you might want to go with a 1500 watt UPS so the most accurate way to measure your actual power draw is By using a like a power measurement device like a kilowatt or an ammeter Or something where you're actually looking and seeing how much current you're drawing And that's that's typically the way I would recommend sizing a UPS is actual load and not just your nameplate rating Yeah, make sure when you test it You have to test it under like whatever the full load is for you or even max it out And the reason why is let's say I have a Dell and I do have one I have one that has the 1500 watt high-end power supplies But the processors and everything in there and the fact that it has SSDs There's nothing in there could possibly at its fullest potential draw what the power supply has the maximum potential for That's why you know people are saying well if I have a 1500 watt in my head It makes sense But if you go unless you plan on changing out the CPUs which rarely you do on an enterprise system Usually you put them in for a lifecycle time before you pull them out But you're not gonna hit that wattage load on there, you know You can even run a synthetic benchmark on there to Simulate load so you can see as high as it'll get but that's usually as high as it'll get it may not Max out and you really don't want it maxing out the power supplies I usually when I'm ordering some my Dell servers, I'll go with the higher-end power supply So it's being stress less so it has a you know, and usually redundant. So Yeah power on there But like you said, it's not exactly what representative of the load from actual working and you can do things like just Run the Linux stress in the CPU pin the CPU and see where it goes Yeah, if you don't have high wattage processors and error or components, you'll never hit that high mark there And in the same vein if if you are taxing that power supply to its fullest That 1500 watt rating is the output of the power supply to write. So there's a higher on the input Yeah, exactly. So you might be they're very efficient So you might have five or four percent on the input above what that that rating is It's very rare. I see that honestly Like you're saying 99% of time the power supply is oversized for the equipment to reduce stress on it you know to make sure that it operates extremely reliably and A lot of these UPS's can handle peak loads that are higher than the rating Especially some of the higher-end double conversion or line interactive system. So You know, I think you're exactly right you stress test that you look at your normal use And then you can kind of use that to determine the correct UPS size, right? And then another thing is like PoE switches you might have X PoE power available But if each of your PoE devices is only using a few watts Which a lot of them only use a few watts and then the PoE port might be rated to put out I don't know. What's what's a PoE? If you have a hundred watt power budget, but you're never going to run more if you understand your environment really well And you're planning for it Because sometimes we put in UPS switches and it may have a hundred watt budget But it's only ever gonna run ten phones and there's not there's never a the building isn't gonna grow So the building is never gonna hold more than ten phones. I I'm never gonna use the full PoE budget of that particular supply. So once again, your rating doesn't have to be What is the maximum budget of my PoE supply and I make sure I calculate that into the formula for my UPS It's what will actually be running on here. We're saying all this. I mean don't get me wrong Jordan It's great when people buy the biggest UPS possible It's just also if you want to be more friendly to your budget you plan it properly rather than bump up and you know buy the max I mean great if you have unlimited budget just buy buy the fancy one I don't live in the world with unlimited budgets It's a cool world if you do live there though I wish maybe one day For now no Yeah, and then we can touch on the load type to and this kind of goes hand-in-hand with VA versus watt So typically you're gonna see VA is the listed capacity for UPS VA stands for volt amps and that's an indicator of your apparent power output. So True power is is your volts your amps and then your power factor is also added into there. So inductive loads typically have a higher volt amp Rating then their watt rating at least for a short time So like motor loads when you're charging up those inductive coils You're gonna see a high current that's out of phase with your voltage So when your voltage and your amps are out of phase, you're typically gonna have a lower power factor For computer loads, this is really not an issue. So when you're sizing a UPS for a computer load 90% of computer loads have power factor correction built into them So what you want to look for is the watt rating the VA rating is kind of marketing fluff for most computer loads So if you're sizing UPS You definitely want to look at the watt capacity of UPS and you can typically ignore the VA capacity of UPS Because VA is always higher than watts and a UPS floor standing a rack mountain. There we go Yes, it seems kind of obvious But there's both choices available for most UPS systems rack mounted units can be a little more expensive because you have a Fixed enclosure that you have to work around whereas with the floor mount style UPS You kind of more space that you can build your UPS in a layout that makes more sense physically for the UPS But now rack mount UPS is are so common and with scales of economy They're pretty close in terms of price. Yeah, 20 years ago That's what we had was the big giant floor mounted models in our server room That was just how we did it then but that was we put that into the 90s. So You'd be surprised how many UPS is I still see from the 90s. I've seen some UPS is from the 80s. Yeah Building integration we had the colored plugs and certain plugs were on the UPS and other plugs were not that way People didn't plug like a random vacuum cleaner or floor heater into our Power system. So we had them all separated and labeled. So yeah, I'm positive like I'm willing to bet that building is because it's not Belong to the company anymore. They sold it. It's still there. It's probably still plugged in like hey, this thing works Just keeps on batteries in it Yeah, and you know every UPS has its lifespan. Yeah That those older units they used a different different type of the fire these pulse based rectifier typically And they're pretty dang reliable But those capacitors start to go out and having a UPS that's old and sitting there And it actually it can cause more harm than this than it's helping picking actually introduce some of those First-page to slide the problems of voltage sags and things like that because as the capacitors And you know, this was famous from other boards for a little while You'd see them kind of swell up and you're like they once the capacitors are swelling That means they're going to not do their job properly and therefore the voltage may not be proper Sags may come in a voltage so that you can have clean power coming in and bad power coming out with that So at some point there is a life cycle at which it's time to replace those Yeah, and even even pass that you can kind of have a fire hazard because you got to a lot of powers going through those UPS Is and as those capacitors age to increase in resistance They get more hot so you can produce heat and that heat can translate potentially do a fire hazards pretty rare They've got a few safety features built in in them Obviously they've got fusing and stuff that keeps the UPS from exceeding its rated power capacity But you know, it's at some point typically 10 years is where UPS Those capacitors have kind of hit their complete life span you can replace them But at that point usually your first smaller grade UPS replacing the whole system makes more sense than tinkering If you're a tinkerer like I am sometimes it's fun to do stuff like that Yeah, remember you're working around very very high capacity capacitors and there is some some danger in that of getting shocked or Well depends on your electronics acumen take Make sure you're careful with that Next next big pipe of UPS that you can choose from would be lead acid and lithium lead Acid is kind of the more traditional style of UPS lead acid batteries I think a lot of people have a sour taste in their mouth because There's some really cheap lead acid batteries that cause issues a lot of commodity Commodity grade UPS is that you might find it like Costco or a Walmart They actually their chargers are built to kind of overcharge those lead acid batteries and on top of that They use very cheap lead acid batteries So some of those systems you might only get one year of use out of the battery two years of use Whereas lithium most lithium products Especially UPS is if you want a urated UPS, which I highly recommend with the lithium system That lithium UPS will have a redundant battery management system and that battery management system makes sure each cell is charged to the appropriate voltage Nothing's being overvolted And it will balance the cells charge between all those cells in the system And it's a longer life cycle on those the lithium batteries. What how long do they last about eight years? Yeah, eight to ten. I'd say ten is what a lot of manufacturers are claiming It's it's actually kind of hard to pin down an exact life span on the lithium product They've been around long enough now that we have a pretty good idea and ten years seems to be a pretty solid Indication to us of their lifespan and we can go over some of the chemistries in the next slide But these are some of the benefits of lithium over lead and the disadvantages Obviously the longer lifespan another big one is the wider temperature operation A lead acid battery is going to perform its very best at 75 degrees Fahrenheit typically That's when it's going to last. It's fully rated lifespan Usually UPS batteries are rated three to five years, but there are batteries that are rated up to 10 years If you go outside of that 10 degree window, you know below 65 degrees Fahrenheit or above 85 degrees You're going to see serious degradation in the lifespan battery Maybe half of its rated lifespan just by going outside that operation window Whereas lithium you can actually go out to like 104 degrees before you see any significant change in the lifespan of the battery So for environments where you don't have the best temperature You know stability and you don't have climate control lithium makes a lot more sense You also have a higher cycle life. So a lead acid battery can be discharged and recharged about 200 times typically A lithium battery you can go I think out to like 10,000 discharge Yeah, the cycle is a lot more on lithium and not everyone realize that they just assume the old chemistry of lead acid batteries I'm like, but you know anyone who's Known what happens the couple times you leave the lights on in your car and you kill a battery They just don't even charge back up to the same amount when they do it It leads got a very different characteristics And the temperature thing is something to really consider especially if you're putting these in your your telco equipment or some of the Intermediaries places that you may have this like where you're running a couple switches and a couple other things In remote locations and we run into this a lot. You don't want to You have to you can't put temperature controllers But all I can say is like it's a little building usually somewhere They got a couple fans in there. It's subjected to the weather outside more than anything else And lithium gives you a little bit more flexibility on that Yeah, and then on top of that, you don't have to send somebody out to the the remote site to replace the batteries Which a lot of times cost more than even just investing in lithium to begin with Yeah, the ones we went all with are lithium. That's what we went with Yeah, and I think it makes the most sense especially for the brak style ups is where you're going out you're putting in you know a bunch of Access points at a site. You don't want to have to go back out to that customer site every three years and mess with the ups You want to set it and forget it, you know A concern a lot of people have brought up whenever I've mentioned I have some lithium ups is is what about you know Aren't these things a giant waiting to explode? problem and not really not There's a lot more safety around them And if you've ever seen what happens when you short out a lead acid battery and it goes crazy I mean, no matter which chemistry you go with you're storing a lot of potential energy You may not see it but you can picture it just like how you wind up a rubber band when you charge these you store A high volume of potential energy densely in a small area If you try to release that energy too fast with a short whether it's lead acid or lithium You have a problem at some level you got to remember your ps batteries are pretty huge So for lithium there is some some extra safety that you really have to take into consideration And that's why I'm a big proponent of using lithium iron phosphate batteries in a ups It's the most stable chemistry of battery out there in terms of lithium Those are the ones that you can puncture and you have the lower risk of fire Uh, you're right every ups system that's you all rated specifically has to have some fire propagation safety measures Whether it's redundant battery management systems Or or something even more sophisticated for the really big systems But that's why I you you should look out for lithium iron phosphate. They last a long time. They're very safe Uh, but you also really really want to make sure that your ups is you all rated That's just an extra set of safety precautions and certifications that it has to go through. I think in europe it's c e Yeah And they're also for for people that don't know and I'll do a breakdown Of one of them soon that they're kind of they're metal contained like the battery itself is not exposed You're not likely to even if you shorted it the battery management system And this is goes for a lot of devices are designed this way the cells will start breaking apart with fuses inside them So shorts just don't they're rare to get a thermal runaway in a ups in general Um and more so because when you look at the way lepo is designed It's a whole series of small cells put together. That's why you need a bms system versus lead acid Is one group of plates dipped in acid So there's not a bunch of separate plates you're charging Uh individually, it's one large battery. So the Thing you get the advantage of I mean phones are easy to because they're small and it's easy to puncture them They don't have metal armor. We're trying to make these things as thin as possible. These are armored in there So physical damage very unlikely Uh short outs generally they just pop the fuses and that's the end of that battery's life But it didn't cause any distress for you. It's just the aggravation replacing it Yeah, and you're right Actually lead acid has its own set of of safety issues that you can take in consideration Especially for me. I see when I go to a lot of these data centers, they have something called wet cell batteries Which are kind of you know on a motorcycle battery. You have to fill it up with water. Yeah It's essentially similar to that, but they're they're really big. I mean these things are three four pounds each and they might have 30 or 40 of them and those batteries You can evaporate the electrolyte Then you increase your resistance and that can cause something called thermal runaway. So you can get thermal runaway with Uh a lead style battery. I've seen it if you look recently in the news There was a data center in france that I think it was in france And that was actually due to to poor maintenance on their under uh Battery management stuff. Yeah the obh fire if you look that up. That was about a year ago. I think Yeah, and you'd be surprised a lot of these data centers Are neglecting their batteries or they just don't have the the knowledge on what to look out for If you see heat in a battery, it's a really bad sign if the battery is is You know batteries get a little bit warm under use, but the battery should never be you know uncomfortably warm to the touch or swelling and those two indicators mean that that battery is dangerous Uh, it's it's either time to take it out of service. I'm gonna take it out of service Leaving something like that can just cause bigger issues Uh, and then there's some common models For lithium units. Usually they're gonna have an li or an l somewhere in there So some extreme models are the j 60 v 80 li p 91 li and the j 90 Then I put the chemistries for all the ones I could figure out Eden has a nine px li and the five p And then apcs the sm to and scl Some of these ups is you have to be careful if they don't ship to certain states I don't know what why the reasoning is behind that if they need some extra requirements Yeah, there's there's a few new requirements that they're putting on for shipping anything lithium Some of the states just made some laws. I think you're trying to sort it all out Yeah, and uh I think there's a certification un 38.3 is at safe transport certification So you can look out for that as a rating that the ups might be able to go in those states I'm not sure you'd have to look up your each each state. Well, and that's changing So I don't want to date the video because check your state's laws and actually if you're buying it, you know You'll you'll find out that it can't be shipped in certain states because even there's warnings now with some of the ups Is but hopefully you live in a future watching this for this has all been resolved So let's go over stand by ups. It's the most basic type of ups This is the type of ups you probably go to office depot and you can just pick up off the shelf They're they're usually pretty small pretty inexpensive, but they have a place I mean for a lot of equipment you don't really need the biggest beefiest ups And there are some good well-made stand by ups is out there. These are the most commodity grade. I'd say they're the most disposable Uh advantages are that they're smaller lighter less expensive Uh, but they don't protect you from all the different power issues you can run into extended extended surges Uh Brownouts that sort of stuff and we can go over the different power issues The gps is protected for a home pc You know just so you have something on there so you can look around you and realize the power went out and go Oh, I should probably power it on my computer You're perfectly fine for that use case Uh, it it does simplicity of it is good Yeah, and the biggest one that's going to damage your home equipment is going to be surgeons, obviously Which is you know from electrical Stores uh stuff like that. So surges are typically what's going to blow up your equipment Uh, and this is going to protect you from that. So let's say, you know the the bare minimum type of ups So you can have but still consider the ups. Yeah, so stand by ups is is essentially just going to be passing your utility input onto your load Uh under normal operating condition Uh, and then as soon as there's a power outage, it's got a little relay That got covered by my air out there. Yeah Yeah, and and roughly forwarded to I've seen some online publishers say 30 milliseconds, but it's rare. You see ups That's 30 milliseconds usually four to eight milliseconds after the power's gone out That relay is going to switch it's going to go over to inverter and you're going to pass your your your power on from your ups Inverter one interactive is a step up from a standby ups. It adds something called an avr An automatic voltage regulator. It's a tiny little automatic switching transformer And what that's going to do is adjust your input voltage Uh coming into your ups. It's got different increments. So if it sees an incoming power is 5 too high or voltage is 5 too high It'll switch it down. So in your output you get 5 lower voltage So if you're supposed to get 120 volts and you got 140 on your input, it'll buck buck that voltage down to 120 These are also low cost They typically have more features than standby ups. So you might go get s and mp So you can or a web interface or usb outputs So you can communicate with ups and they're great ups for a lot of a lot of applications, honestly some lighter duty servers network switches again on home pc And and here's some common models. You'll see you can look up any of those models Yeah, each each ups manufacturer has their indicator of what type of ups. So eaten five as a prefix means that it's just a line interactive ups and then apc sm extreme 80 or 70 series are both line interactive And the 80 series is kind of the more premium option out of those two So really pretty similar the only difference is you've got an avr automatic voltage regulator, which we talked about earlier So that's going to help you adjust your input voltage so that your load has a more A more consistent voltage now It's also going to use that same relay style Of switch. So you got that same transition time Usually that's not going to matter to most switch mode power supply equipment So computer loads don't typically care about that Motor loads can because now you've stopped your motor potentially and I have to restart it Usually it's not fast enough to to matter but some equipment can can get bothered by that switch over time So I would probably say line interactive is a good one for a lot of home users and things like that If you want something a little bit better, but you know, maybe you run into home lab and you go I'd like something a little bit nicer for some of these servers I have and line interactive because it's got that avr and it is It means the price point is not too expensive You know without going into the next level once now online ups. This is where we get a few more things going Yeah, so this is this is really the data center grade ups that you're going to see it's going to protect you from a lot of different issues The the way an online ups works It's it's always going to be taking that input power It's going to be converting it into dc and then re-inverting it into ac So the input voltage that you're putting into the ups never actually touches your equipment on the output Because it's being switched from ac to dc Which eliminates a lot of that noise and that or almost all of that noise and then re-invert it into ac These are super robust and this is really what I'd recommend For for some more critical equipment The inverter circuitry the rectifier circuitry is usually beefier than a line interactive because it's got to work all the time So they give you great protection You can you can get a lot more Noise reduction you can protect yourself from a lot of different issues that you're going to see coming through the power line And you can actually turn an online ups into a line interactive ups if you want to get that higher efficiency Usually they have a function called eco mode You can turn that on so you actually have the option to turn an online ups into a line interactive ups if you needed to These are going to be more expensive than your line interactive systems But they do offer some some great benefits, you know Yeah, the constant conversion makes them because you're always getting a perfect power coming out because it's figuring it out Whatever's coming in doesn't matter. We're going to convert it to dc We're going to convert it ourselves and There is a loss though. I wouldn't gloss rate on these roughly So it depends on the manufacturer it used to be a lot worse I mean these things used to be about 85 90 percent at the high end Now you can see these these types of ups is at at 95 percent efficiency So that's you're only losing about five percent of your your your power budget by converting from ac to dcu and back to ac So, I mean just the efficiency of modern transistors has made these really pretty dang efficient and so To me that the concern about that efficiency is is it's not as important as it used to be Back in the old days when you when you're losing 10 percent of your power to the ups You're generating a lot of heat that that you know, wasn't as nice, but now they're so efficient that I think efficiency is kind of a moot point It's usually the higher price is going to be the the biggest Concern for a lot of people with this type of ups Yeah We used to have one of these on Commercial phone systems and things like that But that was always the thing I was like wow these things they you would notice the inefficiency by the fact that if there's heat The kind of inefficiency that's that's how electronics work if it's generating heat it's doing something inefficient Another benefit I didn't touch on So line interactive ups if it stops working You don't really know until you have a power outage true Because the ups is passing through its input. I mean you're supposed to get a fault But if that doesn't happen, you don't really know a double conversion ups if it has a fault It'll switch over to sts bypass mode and it'll alarm at you and say hey There's something wrong with my internals and you need to address it So if there is a power outage you will at least have that alert beforehand and potentially through the line interactive system You might not not have that notice you find out well Yes, we did some troubleshooting recently where we found out it was a line interactive that had gone But because they couldn't figure out one one whole leg of the network was out and they had several mds It turns out the line interactive one after a small surge Then no one was monitoring it. No s&p hooked up. So maybe it was screaming. I don't know. It just we found a beeping in the closet We diagnosed it by listening. What's that beeping noise? Oh, that's the thing that you can't come on for some reason That's what a whole section of networks down Yeah Find that ahead of time that's cool that it'll alarm because what it's doing is You know instead of doing its job is not only ups a double the double conversion type thing It's just it has a bypass circuit in there So it just goes straight which is cool because it's better than a down situation And that a knowing ahead of time can definitely save you like hey, it's got an alarm on it Let's address the alarm under maintenance window not not when one is thrown upon us Exactly get ahead of the situation before you you lose your power and then you don't get some angry customer Hey, what's going on? Why why is everything going out? Models on these it looks like they're the higher models. So like you can call them the nine series So that's how you know and eat and one is a nine The whole nine line is same looks like extreme same thing. It's got the nine in it. It's all the outlines Yeah, yeah, and a lot of these manufacturers make it very confusing what's the line interactive and what's the double conversion So you really have to kind of dig through a lot of these and make sure it's a true of double conversion Because I think it's I think some of the Lieberts have some some verbiage into the line interactives that You know, you're like is this a double conversion that you look at and it's actually just a line interactive ups So make sure that it's actually a true double conversion Well online ups if you're looking for that that style of ups What you're doing is you're taking that input power you're passing it through a filter and that filters for the ups really Then it's going to be Rectified into dc. It's going to be inverted into ac. It's going to go through a static switch. That's your bypass for the ups It's not the maintenance bypass, but it's the first bypass internal to the ups Then it's going to go through some filtering and out to your load In the case of a power outage, there's zero switch over time because that inverter is always running So if there's a power outage To your your load, there's it doesn't even notice. I mean it's there's zero switch over time And that that sine wave is almost always on on an online ups going to be Sinusoidal it's going to be very very pretty and perfectly signed Isolated online. This is the there's a narrower or fewer of these options Yeah equipment Yep, so medical equipment. I mean these are these are pretty common to not so much in the data center They are still prevalent in the data center Reason being is you isolated online ups what it has on the output is a isolation transformer So for an isolated online ups you can feed it to a way And then the isolation transformer in the output The ups is going to output 240 volts typically and the isolation transformer in the output is going to divide that into 220 volt legs in a 240 volt leg So if you need 120 volts for some reason You can use a style of ups to get a neutral on your output if you only have You know like an l6 30 available instead of an l14 30 So this gives you the extra option of getting 120 volts on your output It also explains that common mode noise, which you see I see that a lot and like from fluorescent lights It's and and just equipment in general lab equipment motors Equipment that puts noise in that that that neutral line because neutral should have roughly zero volts to ground in an ideal condition Your neutral is not going to have much voltage to ground But that's rarely the case because you only spot you bond neutral and electrical system is typically the main panel And the only way you can bond neutral to ground After that is by using an isolation transformer, which this ups typically has it will have integrated into it So yeah, you see these in in medical equipment Areas where they got medical equipment Laboratories, I see them a ton That's the biggest market for these that I've seen is for laboratories Where they've got hplcs, you know gas chromatography machines all sorts of cool stuff X-ray chromatography machine. I put a ups onto it Yep Talking to a guy they they actually take So they designed semiconductors and we were talking about how extensive it is to build the new lab They're building Because they need all this type of equipment because you know, they're it's tiny tiny photography looking at the wafers and making sure There's no variations You can't have any You know common mode noise on the line or you will have a problem where you could Project variation into the semiconductor stuff. They're building their fabrication place Like there's like a 200 million dollar building. They've been able to do this place. It's just crazy But they're a fabricator here in michigan I'm doing it. So I didn't we didn't get into the uh, this talk we're talking most about their four petabytes of storage They need that's how big all the data storage needs are for them. That's But yeah, the actual um the the photography part of it essentially of how they actually look and design stuff Yes, it's extremely Sensitive equipment that they need to build isolation rooms for to understand it and it's not just isolation from Outside influence, but really power isolation and outside potential interferences from things like that. So yeah, this is your This is like you said your lab equipment stuff Yeah, yeah the ultra sensitive, uh, but you do see in data centers, too Yeah, typically a data center is going to use a big 480 volt ups Reason being is when you use a higher voltage in your ups You can use thinner conductors and you have less loss to heat So you can make a a higher capacity ups in the same footprint that you might have a lower capacity ups at a lower voltage So a higher voltage for most ups means you get a smaller size ups for the equivalent Lot rating So if you're choosing a ups, I always recommend going with the highest voltage you have available Because you can minimize the footprint of the ups Now some cases you might want to use a 208 volt ups instead of a 480 volt ups But you're probably going to be talking to somebody if you're looking for that size of ups where it's it's uh, You know, yeah, we we even saw the you know, two 208 ones Um, we don't see as many uh, we don't at least of the 480s Those are because we don't do a ton of work inside of data centers But yeah, and then that all buildings until you get into the bigger buildings have a 480 service. So Our industrial clients do of course, but to run all those processes and things like that, but it's not not your average office building Yeah, 480 is usually 480 volt ups the the minimum size you're typically going to see is can be Maybe 120 kilowatts. So that's so the isolated online It looks like identical to the the the regular online except you've got that isolation transformer the mba mbs indicator on there That's maintenance bypass So that's a bypass that switches your utility out to your load and completely bypasses the internal to the ups That's not exclusive to an isolated online ups. You can have those in a traditional online ups Uh, even a standby ups if you want, this is what allows for maintenance of the ups being able to have a manual bypass Yeah, exactly. So let's see. So maintenance bypass around the topic of bypasses. Yes These are really handy devices You know, they they allow you to bypass your ups To service it to remove it to replace it. It's essentially a switch You can find them rack mounted 1u or 0u in some cases. They sit behind the ups And there's two types of bypass. There's a break before make these are the simplest They have a break over time from when they transfer from ups to utilities Typically roughly six milliseconds like the you stand by ups And the reason they have that break over time is a ups is output is Sometimes not in phase with the input from the utility and a double conversion It's very rarely going to be in phase unless you tell it to be right If you have those two out of phase when you bridge that You can cause all sorts of issues. You're going to backfeed. You can cause sparks You have to make sure your output phasing is in phase with your utility if you're going to bypass it And so if you use a make before break the fancier style bypass without a switching time It needs to be able to communicate with the ups and say hey, you need to get in line with the utility The ups is going to transfer over static bypass That's what sts stands for and then you can safely switch over Because you're you're you're keeping your output in phase with your utility in Just to be clear break before make is probably the least expensive and easiest when you'll get in there They're just slick little devices that when you're building your rack when you're putting it in or you put this little box in there And you're like, oh, I need to service the ups, but I don't want to who wants downtime So you just flip the switch and now you're on your main utility and you can You know swap out an entire ups at this point essentially Yeah, and another nice thing is if you had a complete ups failure What you can do is just go over there click the switch And boom now you have your stuff offline. You're not running around trying to unplug stuff Plug it into p to use It just gives you that that handy function where if if you have a critical piece of gear You don't have to have any downtime other than if the ups fails and you can just quickly switch back really simple device Yeah, really handy Because if you if you don't have one you'll wish you had at some point Yeah, I think we're even talking about some customers that don't want the their equipment to go down at all when they're putting the ups in and Yeah Uh, and there's external and internal ones Internal bypasses you're going to find typically on modular ups is Because the module itself in a modular ups is actually the ups So you can use a they're usually going to be make before break and anything above 5k va The smaller stuff is going to be break before make but the bigger stuff again It's going to be the higher end make before break Typically the old school bypasses were all external but now since the ups enclosure actually doesn't Touch the power you can actually get away with putting these inside the enclosure Both options still exist and they're both really common. I sell probably the For the bigger systems 60 percent of maybe 60 to 50 percent have a bypass somewhere in them Probably 80 percent of the stuff I work with I definitely recommend it And yeah, it's usually going to find these in bigger ups Small ups is they're not as common, but they do exist Extreme power actually makes one that be compatible with any type of ups. We got to eat new ps For the make or the break before make style that's going to work with any manufacturer You don't have to have an eaten brand with a eaten or an apc with an apc And then it's just called a bypass module for the rack style versions Yeah, it's it's a simple device go with that one Connectivity Yeah, so uh connectivity If you're choosing a ups you got to figure out whether it's something that you want If you want to be able to monitor the power coming into it if you want to You know have an snmp trap where if the ups goes down you have an snp server I can send a graceful shutdown command That's the way that I've seen it done typically if you're you're and they can tell it when it's you know On the ups is critically low So you don't have to have a graceful shutdown command when the ups is just turning itself on you can say All right, when the the charge is at a critically low point shut it all my equipment down Yeah, and once again, I'll reference techno tim's video linked in the comments below and he tells you He explains the different linux servers and even building. I think he's got a raspberry pi in there somewhere That you can do the monitoring of it because you want to centralize that data And then send out the commands to things But you need to first have a ups with to feed that data and then spread it out because it's usually not one server You're turning off especially if you guys have more access. It's numerous servers or services that need to be shut down before you shut down the physical server There's an order and a cadence to those things But it all starts with making sure what types of connectivity that the ups is offer Yeah, and uh, I typically stay away from trying to use the usb Because it requires either a lot of them require proprietary drivers Yes, if you have the web interface it really makes it easier because you're not relying on some ups manufacturers driver Connectivity you can do everything just Just from the web card never allow your ups to communicate with the outside world Yeah, don't do that You see all the big manufacturers want people to Have them remote monitor their ups and it's just a huge safety concern to me and I'm sure you agree with that Yeah, and um, I think apc had a vulnerability related to that where they found some Unabilities in it and the the work around is don't connect it online That's like the work around for this and I don't understand. They just didn't implement it in a good way and someone figured out a way to Uh, basically flick your ups on and off multiple times possibly damaging equipment certainly causing chaos So you don't oh my god Yeah, and uh, the only the only thing I can think of that you'd need external communication for would be like a time server But I think you can get that on your local network easier Yeah, that's That's common, you know, you can run a pfSense I set these up frequently with uh time because you know a lot of times people have iot devices Usually cameras and you want the time to be in sync, but you don't want to give them internet access And that's exactly you can run a time server pretty simply on your network and specify it In your dhcp reservations throw it in there. It'll grab the time locally without having to go out to the internet and problem solved that's Without without adding security risk of let's send all our ups data to a cloud so they can monitor it and have the ability To push data back to it. That just doesn't know I agree. Yeah, I was a little bit concerned with how it's like everything's iot now But I think yet anything you can have on a like a vlan without any communication to the outside That's safer you are and there's not really any reason stuff like cameras or UPS should ever be talking in the outside world. Yeah, it just doesn't need to it's in someone flicking the power on and off with that It's just It's gonna be dangerous So here's how you can get ahold of jordan if you're interested in building some of these Follow me linked in this is what got the discussion started because you post a lot of photos of the different things You guys are building and how you're laying them out and everything else. It's just really cool Doing all this. So it's you know building the megawatt ups systems And we've worked some really interesting projects You know, like lately I've been working with the love to these edge data centers. Very familiar with edge data centers, tom no So they're like many data centers that that reduce your your latency so you could have a little enclosure that might be a 60 kva or something And they they sit closer to where the end user is Okay, you reduce your latency. So like netflix might want servers closer to people in some smaller town But they don't their data centers way out in in texas. So you can have an edge data center where you can offload some of that processing To a much smaller smaller data center and then it can kind of handle a lot of that less critical Work and we see it with dns companies too. They want, you know, even though the latency is so minuscule going up, you know, because you're essentially It's still Yeah, it still matters when you're setting it up and you start thinking about some of these real-time protocols and things like that especially anything in the video streaming or Conferencing type of things. Uh, yeah, you'll see these intermediary spots where they have extra Things put in so you know, we see even some clients will stick something in a colo for that intermediary. So, yeah Yeah, yeah, and that latency is put in when you compound it too if you've got to do this process has to wait for that one then all of a sudden that eight milliseconds can turn into like You know half a second something so it makes a difference And as stuff gets more more advanced and we have more processing power So we've scaled out and we make the largest single phase ups. So 60 kilowatts a single phase a lot of these smaller Smaller areas they they don't have three-page phase power. You're using essentially what you get at home So I've worked some cool projects where we're we're using a big big single phase ups. Wow That's pretty cool All right, well leave links to everything we talked about down below direct links to your linkedin and everything if you want to Contact jordan on this. So hopefully you know more and now you can reference what type of ups Understand how they work and which one is a good fit for you. All right. Thanks for your time. Jordan. Appreciate it Thank you tom. Bye And thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video If you've enjoyed the content, please give us a thumbs up If you would like to see more content from this channel hit the subscribe button and the bell icon If you like to hire a short project head over to laurance systems.com and click the hires button right at the top To help this channel out in other ways There's a join button here for youtube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated For deals discounts and offers check out our affiliate links in the description of all our videos Including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and designs come out Well randomly so check back frequently and finally our forums forums.laurancesystems.com is where you can have a more In-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics covered on this channel Thanks again for watching and look forward to hearing from you