Well it's summer time again and that usually means lightning storms and power outages here on the prairies. I've run my WCG farm for years with nothing but cheap surge supressors and I've been lucky, only lost one PSU in that time due to power failures. But now that I have some serious money invested in hardware, it's time to protect it with a quality UPS. Since all my machines now run on 240 volts, it took some investigating but I think I finally found a UPS that will work with North American style split phase 240v and has enough firepower to handle the farm.
Here she is stretched out on my workbench, a brand new HP R3000H 2700 watt 2U UPS bought for $200 on eBay ($1700 retail+tax and shipping here in Canada)!!!
Measurements are 24"L x 17.5"w x 3.5"h. Heavy sucker too! Took me and the UPS driver to lug it off the truck...lol!
A pic of the rear panel. It has 9 C13 outlets, the same kind of connection you find on PSU's. There's enough there to hook up my 6 rigs, the cooling system PSU and one LCD monitor with 1 outlet to spare. I estimate my farms power draw at 1500w so this UPS should give me about 12 minutes of runtime but I'll likely set it up to initiate OS shutdown after 1-2 minutes. If the power isn't back on after 1-2 minutes, it likey is going to be off for a while anyways. The power plug is a 20A twist-lock and there's also a 20A outlet on the right to run a power distribution unit, but I don't have a need for that.
Now to integrate it into the farm!
Please excuse the dirty floor! This is my garage, not my house...lol!
My first thought was to just reinforce the top shelf and put it up there and set the monitor on top, but I would have had to add too much lumber which would just get in the way during maintenance and upgrades. So I built a sturdy floor stand out of 2x4's. The rear attaches to the wall studs and the front sits on it's own legs. There's also a couple cross braces to help support the UPS across the middle. I could have just put it on the floor but this way it's protected from water and I can still store stuff underneath.
It's not connected yet, I'm still waiting for the C13/C14 jumper cables and a serial card from NCIX and of course no one in this hick town had a twist lock 20A receptacle so I had to special order one too.
I'm still not 100% sure this thing will work properly with split-phase 240v but that's easy enough to figure out once it's powered on and charged up. I'll updated this thread in a week or so once I have the data.
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