I am looking to buy a UPS for my Synology NAS. Primary use case is to safely shutdown my NAS automatically in the event of a power cut. So I need a UPS with either usb port or network port. Battery capacity not much of a concern, power cuts are very rare in Mumbai. If I can put my PC too on the UPS its an extra but not required.
Cheapest one I can find with USB port is Cyberpower UT1500E. On the plus side, it should be capable enough to handle both my PC and NAS. On the minus side, its quite expensive at 8k. APC UPS is even more expensive.
Is anything else available cheaper or in the same price range? Also, how is Cyberpower as a brand and their service / battary replacement?
Just use an ESP32 with additional equipment to send shutdown command to NUT which will do the needful. Or a smartplug which you can monitor in a similar way. Dont waste money on the smart UPS
Also from Mumbai, although power failures are rare, they are not always small, had one which was an hour and took down the homelab.
I have connected my Syn NAS to home UPS. Even during whole day power shut down ( we have monthly once power down for maintenance, it works for whole day and gives back up.
That is a good idea, I think I can make it simpler for my use case. I can run a script on the Synology which pings my router every 30 secs and initiates shutdown if 3 consecutive pings timeout. Need to test it out though, how reliable it is
These workaround methods can only be time based or immediate command to shutdown.
With proper ups or maybe a better way including info about about battery percent, we can shutdown when really needed like 30% battery or so. Coz turning on ups back and your devices can be pita, if you are out.
Use a smart plug to cut power after shutdown, that way when you turn on the smart plug, your system boots up with that bios setting (power on after power loss).
This is what I did with my IoT battery monitors, when voltage crossed a threshold, the script initiated shutdown. I use mqtt to communicate between the various systems, nodered for logic and telegram for notifications.
Yes the UPS always stays on, I initiate a shutdown of all loads connected to the UPS when there’s 10% left, so the UPS (inverter in my case) can stay on with almost no load (just the smart plugs) for a few more hours until power returns.
This has limits, for my setup it worked for power outages upto 7 hours:
(“TwinQuanta” is the name of the 2x12V battery bank for a 24V inverter that I downsized to for a couple of years from my original 48V inverter)
WiFi and internet always needs to be available and so does whatever is running the mqtt/nodered setup. I use a mini pc, but a raspberry pi is equally capable.
I had wifi/internet/mini pc on a seperate inverter with a used 150Ah battery that I got for 7k, it can power that 40W load for >42 hours:
Everything is powered directly from the battery for better efficency, the inverter just serves as a charger.
Now that I think of it, this is probably too fiddly of a setup for most home users.
But it is possible. I did things in a complicated way, maybe there are simpler solutions.
I will once I set it up I really haven’t looked into powering it back on but Synology supports Wake on LAN. Quick googling tells me that you can use DS finder to remotely send WoL packet to wake up your synology, but needs more research if you want to look into it.
Yes true, but power cut is infrequent enough (once every 2-3 months or so) for me that I can live with it. I also use my NAS primarily for backup purposes, and sync my most critical data to both the NAS and Onedrive so I am not bothered about remote access to NAS. Obviously, if you need remote access to NAS then the equation changes.
Just fyi, I have APC smart ups model & the battery remaining stat is not accurate. By default it was selected to turn off the pc when 5 min of runtime remaining but in reality when I checked this feature once, the pc was turned before a proper shutdown could happen as battery ran out while apc software was still showing 10-15min runtime left after running on battery power for about 20min (connected pc load was hovering between 30-60W & battery in ups was 9Ah). @rsaeon
Some APC models have a calibrate feature that fixes the time remaining calculation every few months but a low tech solution is just to have shutdown at a higher percentage, like 50%
The proper way to get accurate estimates is to do what EVs do, they keep track of how much capacity the battery is capable of over time and how much energy is put in during charging and how much energy is taken out during discharging.
Yeah, it’s as complicated as it sounds, that’s why many UPS don’t have actual tracking and just guesstimate based on battery voltage. Which is fair, but not accurate.
I’m attempting to do these calculations in software with my lifepo4 rebuild project that will eventually also intentionally discharge the battery down to zero regularly to stay as accurate as possible.
For home use, that solution for pinging a device and initiating a shutdown is pretty clever and will serve everyone’s needs, even mine, if I didn’t need the most uptime as possible.
You could even have a two stage solution. Home inverter connected to the UPS. When the home inverter cuts off, shutdown using UPS power. That way you get decent uptime and will not have to shutdown during short power outages. I’d have done this if I knew about that project/utility and skipped the whole make-my-system ordeal.
So between 45/30 = 1.5 hours to 45/60 = 45 minutes of runtime at 30W and 60W for a brand new battery.
This is another reason to go with lifepo4. 9Ah is always 9Ah since you can go down to 100% depth of discharge every day for years before seeing a decrease in capacity.
The battery was supposed to be brand new (UPS was replaced with a sealed pack unit under warranty). Maybe the apc software not able to calculate the connected load correctly but it was a 5600x+4060+sata ssd pc doing nothing but apc powerchute software opened on screen so even 60W figure is overestimated (idle power consumption of 5600x & 4060 is around 15W each).
