Best UPS approach for a room full of PCs?

[katie279]

Hi all,

Bit of advice needed - fairly frequently have power cuts as out in the countryside. Maybe four times a year which was never a huge deal, but now working from home lots it's more annoying.

So looking to get a UPS of some sort and just wondering what the best options are.

At one end I've even thought about a Tesla battery for the whole house, but really just need to target the office.

In the office I have two main PCs (one with three monitors and the other with four). I've got two Synology NAS units with an extension and two 3d printers.

How should I go about adding UPS protection here? Do I need to buy a UPS for each PC and NAS or should I connect extensions to feed to each PC with one bigger UPS?

Many thanks in advance, very new to all this!

 

[Donnie Fisher]

Depends what you need when an outage happens. Do you need to keep running till the power comes back, or just enough to allow a graceful shutdown , because there could a vast difference in the capacity you need to accommodate for those scenarios.

A quick scan of UPS devices shows run times in the regions of 10 mins at half loads… fine for short blips and dips in the network but if the grid truly drops out then may well not be long enough.

First and foremost though, you need to calculate what draw of power you need to sustain to keep running in watts. Then you can calculate capacity from that.

 

[EsaT]

What are the part lists of those PCs+monitors?

NASes should have power draw value in some sticker or available from Synology's site paging on model number.

Power draw is also needed for 3D printers.
At least for not DIY models it should be in some sticker or on manufacturer's site.

 

[katie279]

Thanks all - really just enough for graceful switch off and to deal with occasional blips (most power cuts are less than a couple of minutes, so 10-15 mins should be plenty).

Both PCs run 650W PSUs and RTX 2070s / AMD Ryzen 3600X

NAS models are Synology DS 918+ with a DX513 extension and another DS420+

Monitors are all ViewSonic VX2776-SMHD 27 Inch

Let me know if anything further needed!

One other question, a lot of UPS' seem to have only kettle plug style connectors, so assume my monitors wouldn't fit or can I have to get converters for this??

 

[Donnie Fisher]

You get cables with kettle connectors at both ends etc.

Before you pony up any big money, buy a wattage monitor plug and use it to measure the actual power usage of what you have.

Also some ups have auto shutdown ability where they can tell the machine to shutdown normally because of a power cut. Iiirc that can include to shut down only once the ups has drained to a low state.


so you could have only the ups connected to the pc, on a power cut, other things like the monitors might switch off, but the pc stays running, power comes back on and the devices come back as well. Only when it’s not able to sustain the pc will it shutdown.

Or just have pc and 1 monitor connected. Power cut happens, you still have 1 monitor to manage the open windows etc, but your not drawing as much power and you’d stay up for longer .


There is so many options and ways to approach it.