Battery Backup / UPS

[EMUreef]

Alright I know a generator is the way to go, but its useless if know is home to switch it over, living with the parents after graduating gives me the luxury of them having one. But i would atleast like the piece of mind for a couple power heads and maybe a return pump hooked up to a UPC.

Does anyone know how to calculate how much time of battery use you get off of something.

Say the UPC provides 900watts of power, how much time to you get with something that is drawing 6 watts? for a Koralia Powerhead.

sorry about the post in the reef discussion, as there is no thread that really fits this question in the equipment area.

[jimsflies]

Here is one I sold a while back. You could connect any size battery to it.

http://www.captivereefs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5400

[EMUreef]

Here is one I sold a while back. You could connect any size battery to it.

http://www.captivereefs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5400

i was more or less looking at how much time you get from when the power goes out, that the powerhead can survive on the battery alone.

[ReeferRob]

Tagging along on this one. Something I've thought of in the past as an affordable means to oxygenate the tank in a power outage.

[jimsflies]

You need to figure out the total wattage (Volts x Amps = Watts) of all of the loads you want to support. This will tell you the size of inverter charger you need.

Then take the wattage you calculate and divide it by 110 then multiply it by the number of hours you want the setup to run. This is how big of a battery you will need in amp-hrs.

[streetrodder007]

Its a UPS not a UPC. Battery backup time is calculated differently from each manufacturer and each different type of battery. Run time is always going to be different on what type of load is induced on the system. Is it a capacitive load, or an inductive load. Example- fluorescent lights are inductive load's with very poor power factors, that is why we install capacitor banks inline / before the lighting panels themselves to correct the power factor, so you don't slam the system, etc etc etc, wiping out your UPS system in 1 minute, or have a diming effect when a lot of power is being turned on.

[EMUreef]

yea i meant UPS :-( shoulda known that one lol.

the only thing that i would care to be on backup is a power head or two. atleast keep the water moving.

[streetrodder007]

Throw 1 Koralia nano 250 head in there rippling the top of the water off a small computer UPS, does not draw much power, and should be better than nothing I would assume.

[streetrodder007]

EMUreef- Here are some pics of a UPS that I am currently installing. Its on a large commercial building, but you will get the idea. Hope you like the pics. Hope it doesn't bore you .

Back up power is 4- Caterpillar 480 volt 1500 amp generators that run a 480v / 6000amp Bus system to power the entire building. The paralleled UPS system is made up of 3 MGE UPS modules, each module has 1 string of batteries. Each string has 240 cells. each cell has 2.2vdc, and each battery weighs roughly 500lbs. So each string puts out 535 volts on average. With all 3 modules running, we can support roughly 300 amps at 480v for approx. 24 minutes. We should never need this amount of time as long as each generator starts and ramps up to 1800 rpm's within 7 seconds.
http://i858.photobucket.com/albums/ab148/streetrodder007/downsize-4.jpg
http://i858.photobucket.com/albums/ab148/streetrodder007/downsize-3.jpg
http://i858.photobucket.com/albums/ab148/streetrodder007/downsize-1.jpg
http://i858.photobucket.com/albums/ab148/streetrodder007/downsize.jpg

[medwards]

Ok spill the beans, whos fish room is that for!!??

[jimsflies]

Here are some pics of a UPS that I am currently installing. Its on a large commercial building, but you will get the idea. Hope you like the pics. Hope it doesn't bore you .


:waiting: I'm bored...how long will it run a Koralia 250?

[jolson10450]

an example, we have ones at our work. they are 1200w capacity ups's and we run about 1000w worth of power on them and they stay on for about 15 minutes before running out of battery. i would say if you only had 10w on a 100w ups it would last only about an hour or so.

ups's wern't intended for the reef hobby. they are designed in case of a power failure or if the power goes out it can automatically shut down a computer so all data isnt lost or the hard drive fried so they usually only last a few minutes.

[cmpenney]

The output from a computer UPS isn't the best for motors either. It's usually a square wave which doesn't work very well with AC motors. They are OK for electronics becuase the power supplies in pretty much all electronics change the 120v AC into 5 & 12 DC right off the bat. AC motors are designed to so work with a true sine wave. Using a PC UPS to run a motor will at best result in way less than peak performace for a shorter time, and at worse ruin the motor and the UPS.

You can get by this problem if you are using a DC powerhead like a stream(not the nanos), vortech, or the DC version of the Koralia for the reason I stated above.

[cg5071]

thanks, that is good to know.

[jimsflies]

You can get by this problem if you are using a DC powerhead like a stream(not the nanos), vortech, or the DC version of the Koralia for the reason I stated above.

You mean avoid the problem, right? And the tunze nano stream 6055 would be a dc version...

I also have read that most computer ups's need a certain size load ~50watts to work properly. Again they are designed for computers which would have that much load, where as a small power head may only have 20 watts or so. I'm not an electrical guy, so I'm not sure if that is trur or not, but it's something to keep in mind.

I think the tripp light power inverters like the one I posted in the link above are made to work with a wide range of electrical items. Not sure but they may have a sine wave output or approximate one.

[cmpenney]

Some of the more expensive ones are OK. You just need to check the output specs and make sure that the output on backup is PWM sine wave and not square wave and you'll be OK.