Very disappointed witht the 'Belkin 500VA Superior Series Emergency Battery Backup'

Richie1509 said:
Hi there sl33pyhead, the 275W figure was with the system under load. I tried a couple of tests, one whilst 3DMark 2006 was running, the other while playing Rainbow 6 Lockdown for about ten minutes. At idle the system draws around 155W and shows 30% load in the Belkin software. These figures are for just the pc itself, no monitor or anything else, connected to the ups.

As to monitors i use a ViewSonic VX924 19" tft which draws 37W maximum, i also have a 17" iiyama crt which draws around 110W. If i connect my other pc, as detailed in my earlier post, and the iiyama crt monitor to the 500VA Belkin ups it is again unable to provide sufficient backup capacity.
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Ah. Thats fine. I thought you figure must have been at load. The killer would be the CRT, although the Belkin certainly seems to be underpowered compared to its rated specs.
 
Well thinking about it i am now just going to get 3 power leads with both ends having 3 prong sockets and putting them on my beefy APC UPS and then keeping the belkin for things like speakers and mobile chargers etc as it does have the surge protection on all plugs.
 
mine works fine runnign rig in sig, plus a dual cpu server with 6 hdd's :d lucks like you got a duff one get back to ocuk in shop and kick off they will swap
 
guys

500 va is not 500 watts although ( w = volts * amps )

but in this case watts = volts * amps * pf ( power factor )

PF is about 0.6 lag on a switch mode psu

therfore the suported load is 500 * 0.6 = 300watts

most psu are now able to supply draw 500 watts at full load, these 500 va ( 300 watt ) units will not cut the mustard

if you want UPS get a 1000va APC one ( yer pays your money and getts the goods )
 
The battery supplied with this unit simply cant supply the amps needed to the inverter. I wired up a 46AH battery to mine and it now lasts at least 10 mins, check your local car boot or ebay 'leisure battery' Any deep cycle battery will work.
 
Thanks for the very informative input lordedmond. So, if i understand this correctly, if my pc draws 275W from the mains taking into account power factor means it is going to draw around 458VA from the Belkin Battery Backup, which is not that far off the units maximum 500VA capacity.

It seems to me that this explains why the 500VA Belkin Battery Backup being unable to function correctly with the more power hungry setups. The actual load on the Battery Backup is too close to it's maximum capacity when required to supply power via its batteries. Also, the Battery Backup seems, with my equipment at least, to be slower to switch over to its batteries the higher the load on it. However this does not explain the situation of the desk lamp briefly switching off.
 
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lordedmond, if you read my previous posts you would realise it sits at 40% UPS load at idle. Which I woulld say is more than satisfactory. I realise 500VA is not 500W, I have done physics at school. So basically, you are saying my lamp is drawing more than 300W and therefore causing a switch over delay? Or did you just not read that bit?
 
A lot of belkins products are poor, espically their wireless routers and network cards which never seem to get a signal, Id steer well clear of them in the future.
 
Energize said:
A lot of belkins products are poor, espically their wireless routers and network cards which never seem to get a signal, Id steer well clear of them in the future.
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I have a Belkin KVM and that has been great though :confused:
 
I have three of these and they work just fine. Yours apparently doesn't. Take it back. OK- so it's not a proper UPS, but they shut my machines down fine if I turn the power off at the switch.
 
if you want a proper UPS you need to spend at least £70-80 on and APC one
650VA is the minimum APC one id get

am currently tempted to go for a more expensive one so it will power a 19" crt and the tower and the cable modem for at least 10 minutes

£100+ seems a fair bit of money but if your pc cost a grand its well worth it for peace of mind

i thought there was something up with the belkin ones by the way that everywhere was selling them off for £15-20

are Belkin bringing out a new range of UPSs or are they chucking in the towel as they know they are inferior to APC?

if they really are that bad it seems a very poor business stategy by belkin
theyd have been better off recalling them and disposing of them
rather than tarnishing their name and dealing with complaints and refunds
 
Belkin says [I rang them today] the units are faulty and they will replace them. Looks like all your suggestions about my desk lamp drawing too much power and me somehow using A PLUG WRONG were all nonsense after all
 
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Eliminos said:
Belkin says [I rang them today] the units are faulty and they will replace them. Looks like all your suggestions about my desk lamp drawing too much power and me somehow using A PLUG WRONG were all nonsense after all
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Haha, you didn't take all that rubbish seriously did you? :p
 
Eliminos said:
Belkin says [I rang them today] the units are faulty and they will replace them. Looks like all your suggestions about my desk lamp drawing too much power and me somehow using A PLUG WRONG were all nonsense after all
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Settle petal. :D

I have one sat at work, I hope it's OK. Awards to WJA96 for the 'I suspect it's defective, actually.' bet.
 
I emailed ocuk about using a 530w psu on these. They advised me not to saying it wouldnt work. Would have thought at idle it be ok but under load these units would struggle. As for the desk lamp stuff it sounds like a dodgy batch maybe. See how many other people post up similar faults with them.
 
Eliminos said:
But like gary996 said. A proper UPS always runs off the batteries, and does not have a bypass like this does.
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There are three types of UPS:

Offline UPS: Runs load off the mains most of the time, switches over to battery power if mains fails, most budget UPS are this type

Online UPS: Runs load off battery 100% of time, charges battery at a fast enough rate to keep up. Expensive, used for critical servers

Line interactive UPS: A mix of the two, the inverter is running all the time and is synced to the mains, but the majority of the power is taken direct from mains when available, Pretty affordable these days, more epensive home UPS are line interactive (such as the belkin regulator pro gold series 650va costing approx £75)
 
Eliminos said:
lordedmond, if you read my previous posts you would realise it sits at 40% UPS load at idle. Which I woulld say is more than satisfactory. I realise 500VA is not 500W, I have done physics at school. So basically, you are saying my lamp is drawing more than 300W and therefore causing a switch over delay? Or did you just not read that bit?
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yes i did read it
no i am not saying your lamp is drawing 300 w ( but it could if it was a big un )

in the lamps case it is a resistive load thefor w= v*a

a resisive load has a pf of unity ie 1

your unit is faulty , K for not working or kaput RMA it asap
 
I've not tested my Belkin properly but I am getting into Windows with a 'Send Error Report' each time which is related to the Belkin - anyone else getting similar?
 
So I've got one of these as well, when my PC is running is says about 46% load which seems fine:-

belkin.jpg


but as soon as a try a "test" from the software or just turn the power off to the UPS my computer just goes straight off, I've checked to see if the "overload" LED comes on but it doesn't. (battery level is down abit because I've been messing around with it"

HEADRAT
 
Just done a 10 second test with mine and my pc instantly switched off - little angry. Can someone please tell me what the point of these things are if they cannot keep 1 pc + 1 tft on for 10 minutes after a a power cut.

Should we all be asking for a refund or are we simply asking too much of a £30 ups?
 
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