Testing UPS integrity on a scheduled basis 2

[TopRung]

We had a situation today where a supposed "functional UPS" failed when our power was lost to our building.

It did not supply any power, not did it indicate on the device that the UPS was "dead" prior to the outage. It worked apporxiamtely 1 week ago, but today.. nada.


So, this begs the question... What is the best way to have REGULARE integrity checks on production UPS devices?? Is there a way to do this without running mock power outages??

Thank you.

 

[stallard]

You could run a scheduled self test (brand/software would govern how often and what sort of tests you can run), this would usually indicate a problem with the UPS, this may cause a problem in itself as a terminal failure may drop the attached devices anyway when the test fails.

You could schedule after hours testing on non-critical loads, if you have loads that are mission critical you may want to look into parallel UPS systems (can be reasonably cheap to implement nowadays) or modular UPS systems where the failure of one component does not cause the failure of the entire system (can be expensive), most manufacturers have both these options available.

 

[TopRung]

stallard,

Thank you for your reply.

what you have suggested is something that I have seen in practice at other facilities. Howerver, are you aware of any third-party testing applications. Since they all appear to have a serial connection, i was wondering if, AT THE LEAST, there is a way to plug a laptop into the UPS devices and run a diag on them. Similar to 'Powerchute' but one that is more universal.

Thanks!

 

[netmanrick]

If the UPS has network capability you could monitor/test via SNMP.

Rick Harris
SC Dept of Motor Vehicles
Network Operations

 

[stallard]

All manufacturers have their own software which only works with their UPS's. I have never seen generic serial software offered (not saying that someone doesn't offer it, just that I have not seen it), even looking through the Open Source options there does not appear to be an offering that supports multiple manufacturers within the same package.

You can use Network cards in your UPS's and use SNMP, although even there you would need to load the manufacturers MIB's so you would not be much better off, although you could script the testing/shutdowns etc.