glug's Full Review: APC Back-UPS RS 1500VA (BR1500) UPS System
1500VA of protected power at this price is phenomenal, especially when its APC quality. In addition to protecting AC powered equipment, this UPS also has surge suppression for phone/DSL lines and for your ethernet LAN. Not only will it protect against surges and noise, this one will also protect against brownouts and overvoltage.
The software it comes with will tell you how much power you are using at the current time, in addition to how long you can run off of batteries at the current power level. You can set the acceptable input voltage range (both min and max), so that when the input is too high or too low where it will turn on AVR trim or AVR Boost to correct the voltage. You can set it to automatically shut down your computer after either a certain # of minutes on battery, or when there are a certain # of minutes of battery time remaining.
The power outlets (6 battery backed, 2 just surge protected) on the back are intelligently laid out, so that the "brick" type of power plugs don't have to block more than the outlet they are using.
An extra battery pack is available which plugs into the back of the unit, QUADRUPLING the battery uptime for $99.
Now onto the DOWNSIDES:
My biggest gripe is that the accompanying software will only shut down the ONE computer attached via USB. Since this is a Back-UPS, not officially a Smart-UPS, the more sophisticated versions of APCs software which will shut down other machines in the network do not support it properly. I suppose it would be possible to write your own software to do this, as the UpsControl.dll which their software uses is a standard C++ DLL with name mangling on the exported function names so you can get the parameter list, but you should not have to do this.
The battery time is extremely short if you use the rated capacity of 1500VA (865W), 3 minutes. The time is not linear with usage, suggesting the fast drain at high load is from internal resistance in the battery. At a more normal 268W for 1 computer & monitor along with speakers, router, and cable modem on the backup, the battery time is 27 minutes.
The USB detection by the software is flakey, especially during bootup. After rebooting you frequently have to remove and re-insert the USB cable from the back of the UPS. (Doing this on the computer side does not do the trick).
The voltage range selection for it to turn on AVR Boost is rather limited -- the maximum voltage you can set for it to treat as a brownout and turn on the boost is 104V, which is 16V from the nominal 120. On the overvoltage side, it lets you set it a much closer 6V above nominal. There is a loud clicking noise when the AVR trim kicks in and out.
The event log file it uses to record every time the voltage correction kicks in or it switches to battery or gains/loses the USB connection is a static size, only 14K. This means if you have unclean power input it doesn't take very long for the log to wrap around and forget about bigger events like blackouts or forget that you did a self-test.
The weight listed on the details page here is wrong -- this thing is 25 POUNDS, not ounces.
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