I’m running a rather small homelab and am hunting for a good UPS to help keep everything running smoothly. My top priorities are:
- Just enough battery life to keep things running until they can be shut down
- Compatible with open source software for monitoring and automated shutdown
Would I have better luck getting a used one and a new battery, or a brand new unit altogether? Anyone have one they don’t need anymore, on that note? 👀
Thanks for the advice!
Some cheap Eaton… I got a multi-plug from Eaton, works fine.
I wouldn’t go cheaper…
And remember that for any ups you need to plan replacing batteries every 12-18 months!
Eaton are probably the best out there. In my experience battery last between 3 and 4 years.
My latest purchase is an Eaton, hope battery are better quality ad well!
Take a look at this list: https://networkupstools.org/stable-hcl.html
I use an older APC Back-UPS 500 to power my homelab and all network devices. So far it’s saved me from 3 power outages, and can last about 30 minutes with a 50W power draw. It doesn’t have data connections of its own (newer devices do), so I had to improvise with an ESP32 board that reports if it detects a voltage on the beeper, plus some cron jobs on Proxmox.
This is the real answer - get something that NUT supports
An APC from wherever. Just don’t buy a CyberPower. They’re much cheaper for a reason and cause more downtime than they save.
I have dealt with a lot of units over the years, both consumer and professional. I have had more non-battery issues with APC ones than the Cyberpower ones, especially with the rack mount units.
For batteries they all have a lifetime, so I don’t trash a brand simply because the battery dies. That will happen to any UPS battery. However it is well known that APC floats the batteries too high resulting in slightly more runtime at the expense of battery longevity. I have replaced more APC batteries as a result.
All of that said, at the consumer level I just tell people to go buy whichever one is on sale at that moment since at least one of them usually is.
Was going to say this too. I boitstrapped a financial trading compny using mostly cyberpower uos at the desks so have run a few hubdred of them over the last fifteen years with nounexpected problems. Replace them after fice years and rarely hd any die prematurely. Not to say this is a good idea, just that it imokies quality iant terrible. Lol