[BBLISA] UPS suggestion

[Edward Ned Harvey]

> > When you buy APC, buy SmartUPS.   Not BackUPS.   And not SmartUPS SC.
> 
> Ok, I'll bite, why? what's the difference?

I'm going to have to wrack my brains to remember why I reached this conclusion ... Forgive me if I'm too vague for taste ...

At a former company, I had Backups instead of Smartups.  Because it was cheaper and I couldn't produce any compelling reason to care.  If I remember right ... First of all ... I think the backups does not allow hotswapping of batteries.  I think they both behave gracefully in over-load conditions.  I think the backups maybe had no way to monitor it.  In fact, now that I think of it, I think the backups doesn't allow changing of batteries at all.  I'm unsure.

I know we had some backups of the extra cheap type, something like BE550G, that stayed at peoples' desks.  Occasionally without any power interruption, the devices would just start beeping as if there was a power interruption.  (Once every ... I guess 3-4 months).  So users would basically panic, and press the big button UPS, which is the power button, causing an outage for themselves.  I learned if it happened, you only needed to touch the little "test" button and it would go back to normal.  It was weird.

As for SC ... Again, I'm unsure, but from the top of my brain, I seem to remember a huge disparity between the VA and W rating.  Which meant I could power more machines with a SUA1500 than I could with SC1500.  Also 6 ports instead of 8 ports meant I didn't have to use another power strip, and even with the same size battery in there, the SC would die sooner, with a shorter runtime.

You know what - I'm really just not sure.  I don't remember why to stay away from backups or SC, but I know they're cheaper for some reason, and in the past I decided to stay away from them because I regretted taking the cheaper option.

The one thing I know for sure - The regular smartups - SUA and SUA XL - Have never disappointed me.  Monitoring, overload, periodic self test, brownout, warranty, hotswap, standard batteries...  These are the only UPS's that I've used and felt confidently *decreased* power outages.  I've only had a single power outage caused by SUA.  But I've had 6-10 caused by backups over ~3 years, and 4 in a single year caused by tripp-lite.