My old APC Back-UPS ES – BE700G-UK decided to give up the ghost last weekend, started beeping and switched everything off!  I bought it in 2011, so it’s not done too badly, costing me about £10 a year!  It was probably a little underpowered for the equipment I had connected anyway, so it was time for an upgrade.  Meet my new CyberPower UPS!

Cyberpower UPS

So far, this has been working perfectly. I needed to change some cabling, as it only has 2 standard UK plug sockets on the back, but has 4 IEC C14 connectors. I had 8 devices plugged into the old UPS, although only 4 were on battery backup with the other 4 just surge protected.

I ended up with my 2 servers connected via IEC cables and my main switch and iMac plugged into the UK plugs. I bought an IEC C14 4 Gang extension to plug the other devices (Virgin Modem, AirPort Extreme, Soundsticks and Freecom Hard Drive Dock) into, although they probably don’t need to be in there.

Even with everything powered on, I’m only pulling about 25-30% of what the UPS is capable of, and it’s telling me it will run on batteries for ~20 minutes, which is more than enough time for my server to shutdown.

I still need to test that, but just haven’t found the time. I will and let you know…