New Year – New UPS
But how do you choose which one?
If you’ve already got a UPS installed, you’ll have a much better idea of what to look for when the time comes to upgrade or replace it. If not, it can be a daunting prospect, fraught with conflicting advice (if you read what’s available on the internet).
There has been a great deal of development within the power protection industry over the last few years, driven largely by the desire for greater energy efficiency and lower lifetime costs of UPS systems overall. Advances in technology and manufacturing that have resulted in smaller, more powerful products with fewer component parts have ably assisted this evolution (fewer components equals greater reliability as there are fewer parts to develop faults).
Choosing a UPS is too big a subject to cover in one, small blog post and it should also be a consultative one, so the aim here is not be provide a definitive answer but to offer key pointers that are important in the decision process and that, with the benefit of forethought, will greatly assist the procedure.
Firstly, categorise your business systems into ‘critical’, ‘essential’ and ‘nonessential’.
Decide which are crucial to the continuity of your business. Canteen services, for example, may be desirable but are not critical and do not, therefore, require UPS power protection. Printers are normally non-essential (unless yours is a printing business). In terms of computer systems, batch-processing may be essential but may not be critical, whereas online services will be critical for most retail-type businesses (banks and shops).
Matching UPS to application
Answering this question, either online or on paper, would run into a few hundred pages and end up as a book as it is a complex and involved process requiring specialist power protection expertise. As luck would have it, however, we have done just that and The Power Protection Guide – the design, installation and operation of uninterruptible power supplies was published in 2007. It’s available from Amazon, all good booksellers and our own estore. At 290 pages, it details all of the elements you need to think about in terms of matching UPS power protection to application, covering such items as criticality, UPS topologies and designs, UPS sizing and selection, online UPS designs, building in UPS reliability and resilience, batteries and alternative UPS back up solutions, UPS and generators, UPS monitoring and remote control, UPS logistics and installation, UPS warranties, maintenance and service. We’ve purposely incorporated a detailed index to make it easy to reference and appended some useful forms and worked examples. It is illustrated throughout with clear diagrams, charts and graphs. It’s a handy tool for anyone responsible for (or involved in) protecting and assuring delivery of critical power supplies for the continuity of their business – whatever business that might be.