ic, Alas, although some of these units advertise this capability, they don’t reliably operate this way. I’ve tried several brands as solar-charged UPSes at remote radio antenna sites, and all eventually failed within just a couple months of the batteries didn’t make it through a long gray spell. In my experience, they may initially work as a UPS for a few power outage cycles, but then suddenly fail permanently with burned components. Some vendors actually say operating as a UPS — drawing power while charging — voids the warranty, despite appearing to work. For mission-critical operations, it’s best to use a name-brand self-contained UPS designed for the purpose. In a small space you won’t get more than an hour or two of runtime, but that’s the physics we’re stuck with at this time. -mel via cell
On Apr 8, 2025, at 5:30 AM, ic via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
Hi,
On 6 Apr 2025, at 20:55, Mike Hammett via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
I'm trying to find something that keeps my customer's network gear online for a meaningful amount of time. The challenge is that an ONT, firewall, switch, AP, and some IP phones doesn't add up to be very much load. Most normal UPSes get terribly inefficient at lower load ratings. Add up all of the network devices a customer may have and we rarely break 50 watts of load. Normal, small UPSes are lucky to break 50% efficiency at those loads whereas they may be 95% efficient at say 100 or 200 watts. Get a bigger unit with a bigger battery and now you're even less efficient. Get a big enough unit to have extendable batteries and now you're spending thousands of dollars for such a small request.
I've gone asking, but haven't really gotten anywhere. The best technical solution was from some electronics parts nerds that was basically to build my own small rectifier and battery system. Great. I can achieve high efficiencies with small loads, letting me have say 4 or 8 hours of battery. However, I've got a science project, not something I can deploy at a customer.
I'm hoping one of you has the magic bullet in what product a service provider should use in this scenario.
Oh, and of course, being able to centrally manage them from my own iron would be great too. :-)
For places which are not proper IT cabinets, I’d go with something like https://us.ecoflow.com/ - most (if not all) support charging while output is on, and you get the extra benefit of being able to add a solar panel if you want to.
Not sure about the efficiency though.
BR, ic
_______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog@lists.nanog.org/message/HSXYBNXQ...