Back and with some results! Ok, so here's how it went down...
Last night I tested my 850PFCLCD...Unplugged it from the wall outlet, but Mac OSX did NOT shut down. I had a timer running and i let it go for 5 minutes with no result...In my menu bar, my energy saving icon showed that my Mac was still connected to the "Power Adapter" and not the "UPS"...which was disconcerting.
Now before anyone begins to blame these on CyberPower units, I tried to troubleshoot this issue and googled this in particular:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2569424?threadID=2569424&tstart=0&messageID=12219459
So apparently, even users were experiencing this issue on APC back-UPS units, which would presume this to be an OSX issue. Now if you skim through the thread, the user actually did a complete reformat and complete reinstall of 10.6. I wasn't about to do that lol.
Anyway, I was pretty tired and decided I'd test more the next day so I just went to bed. So this morning I went ahead and repaired my disk permissions and then reset my PRAM. I booted into OSX and performed the test, and the UPS was recognized perfectly. Mac OS will give you a pop up warning immediately saying that your machine is now running on UPS power and that it will shut down soon.
I had a number of programs running: Safari, Mail, Air Display, iChat, iTunes, Activity Monitor, Steam, and Pages (with document loaded). After a minute, as expected, OSX shut down...I didn't actually see my programs shutting down one by one, but I did get that bluescreen with the spinning loading icon in the center right before shut down so it was pretty graceful. Oh and by the way, my 850VA unit was showing 30-40 minutes of run time! And definitely more than 40 minutes if you dim the brightness of your screen and close some apps. Note that my iMac is the only electronics using the UPS. Still though, i think that's pretty impressive considering I'm using only an 850VA!
Keep in mind that the closer the power draw is to the rated power draw of a UPS, the more efficiently it runs, which is somewhat counter-intuitive. Tripplite has nice graphs of this on their website. So getting a 900w UPS when your typical power draw is going to be closer to 150w is going to make it run inefficiently, which means energy is wasted as heat.
I think a high end double conversion UPS would always see this inefficiency, but cheap UPSs will not, only when they are on the battery (which is when it is important for battery duration). Anyways you might want to look closer to the 300-500w range depending on how many peripherals you are running.
This makes sense to me and I also wanted minimal power draw and energy usage so I tried to get a smaller sized UPS....I think the 1350VA and 1500VA units are best suited for Mac Pros and power users who've loaded them with 4 hard drives, several external monitors and other high powered peripherals.
The LCD feature is gimmicky, on the low end UPSs I've seen they only show you volts which is pretty useless, watts or amps would be far more useful. Get a kill-a-watt for $20 and you'll get far more useful information and you can use it all around the house. After the first 5 minutes of having your UPS, you'll never look at that LCD panel again 🙂
It might have been gimmicky for older, first generation models that introduced the LCD feature, but I definitely don't think it's gimmicky on the new CyberPower units! These things give you quite a wealth of information. Using the "display" button on the front of the unit, you can cycle across Input Voltage, Output Voltage, Estimated Run Time, Output in Watts, Output in percentage, battery level percentage, and number of power outage events has occurred. If you check out the official CyberPower PDF here:
http://www.cyberpowersystems.com/user-manuals/cp1350pfclcd-cp1500pfclcd-UM-092010.pdf
You'll see under "Definitions For Illuminated LCD Indicators" that the display shows a lot of helpful information. So this is where I must disagree. I have in fact used the LCD a lot and has been proven to be very helpful to me
🙂
I think Cyber Powers "Adaptive Sine Wave" is a more marketing crap, the power factor on that UPS is lower than on the APC or the Tripplite, although pretty close (.58 vs .6). Higher quality UPSs like the Tripplite SmartOnline series or the higher end APC Smart-UPS will have a power factor closer to .8.
Although I don't disagree that a lot of it is marketing, there is definitely something different going on. The biggest issue with approximated sine wave units with the Mac Pro was that when the UPS kicked in, the PSU would start exhibiting an odd buzzing sound. I had both the AVR and PFC units from CyberPower when I used to have a Mac Pro, and with the AVR UPS (approximated sine wave) it had the weird buzzing sound, but with the PFC UPS (adaptive sine wave), the buzzing sound disappeared. I certainly don't know all the scientifics that go into a UPS, and won't pretend to be well versed in all the technical specs, but I just wanted to point out my observations when using both of them.
Don't splurge on a UPS, you just need it to work for 5 minutes to get you past short outages, or let your computer run long enough to shut down for a long outage. Get something well made but don't go overboard on capacity. If you splurge, I'd splurge on quality, not capacity.
I agree. I also personally never intended to keep working under the UPS battery, so I went with lower VA.
Good post Rob, thanks I appreciate it.
Choosing a UPS is far tougher than I thought.
My max budget for this should be between $150-$230
Yes it is tough and very confusing indeed! But I ended up purchasing my 850VA unit for $109 out the door from J&R.com. Couldn't be happier
😀
If I were to buy the CP1500PFCLCD or the CP1000PFCLCD, should I buy an additional surge protector? If so, where would it be plugged? (before the UPS itself, or connected to a plug from the UPS? If so, would either way void my UPS' warranty? equipment coverage? Would a 'pure sine wave' still be delivered? ( Now I know for a fact that iMacs DO use Active PFC Power supplies, which make those CyberPower's attractive)
You shouldn't mistaken these PFC as pure sine wave units. I know CP has it's marketing term (adaptive sine wave), but they are still not "pure". A true pure sine wave UPS easily costs 3 times as much as any of these units. So will that feature still be active with a surge protector on? I think it would if the UPS came before the surge protector (that is: power outlet > surge protector > UPS > iMac). As for that bit, I've heard of some people again in the Mac Pro forums that have done that, but I know this is not recommended by the UPS companies. Personally I don't want to take a chance myself so I don't mix the two. If you're adamant about using a higher quality surge protector, why not just plug that into a different outlet?
I would assume those UPS' surge protectors are decent enough, they may not be able to handle a lightning bolt, but your everyday fluctuations, they should. Buying an additional surge protector like the Tripp Lite Isobar might be nice, but not sure if it's within my budget.
That's why I just kept simple and use both the UPS and the surge protector on my UPS unit.
