[wellylug] Recommend a UPS?

[Nic Cave-Lynch]

Hi

I bought a UPS from Vectek electronics which seems to fit the bill of Linux 
compatibility (as well as many other things). This page has links to relevant 
documents:

http://www.vectek.co.nz/power_quality_solutions/ups/

I think they're rebadged delta devices. They might be a bit more high-end than 
the APC devices: the double conversion means _no_ interruption when the power 
fails, rather than the very small delay when a line-interactive device switches. 
a downside is that there is hurling great fan running all the time. I ended up 
putting my UPS in the airing cupboard because of the noise.

You asked about 'big enough'. I ended up with a 3 kVA device. My load is 
comparable to yours (maybe one device fewer, but more monitors). I initially 
thought 1 kVA would be enough but the device was running permanently at about 
80% capacity, and often peaking at more than that. I decided that 1.5 kVA would 
be fine, but because of stock issues at Vectek I ended up with a 3 kVA device 
for a really good price. I'm fairly sure it'll keep everything going for about 
40 minutes (but I haven't tried it yet: the only power outage so far was only a 
couple of minutes.

One thing to note with UPS ratings: there's a difference between the Watts drawn 
by the loads and the kVA rating of the UPS, this is because the loads aren't 
purely resistive. Some very sneaky UPS manufacturers (Power Kinetics come to 
mind) use an unrealistic factor for converting between the resistive load and 
the kVA, so a 1.2 kVA device from them will barely run two PCs, but a 1 kVA 
device from Vectek (who understand about these things) will drive two PCs fine.

Nic