Generator will not run UPS battery Backup

Here is something I learned recently, your typical generator will not power a UPS.  the problem is with the HZ or frequency of the power the generator is producing.  Electric coming from the power company is nice and stable at 60HZ, but the power being produced by a generator is all over the board.

Edited by Josh Van Cleave - Nov/21/2008 at 8:43am

It me it doesn't make sense to try to get power to the battery. It is a waste of a precious resource, electric power.

If an outage was to go long term you would of course have to add oil to the generators. This would of course require the generators and the servers to go down.

I cant believe how timely your answer is. I never thought about the device we were powering, just the generator itself.

Hi,

Thanks Tony!  I will give it a shot right now!

Tony, we set the sensitivity to the lowest setting and we got a different result, now the UPS shows as on-line but the AVR Boost light is on and the Site Wiring Fault light is still on.

Hi Josh,

Edited by Tony-ExcessUPS - Dec/02/2008 at 5:26pm

Tony,

Here is the latest, we bought a 7000 Watt Generator for $799, it was able to run 2 of our battery backups. Excellent!

Each APC says it takes 26 AMPS/2700 Volts, and the generator is actually only a 6000 running watt generator with 2 phases. So two is really all it can power.

Edited by adamwlewis - Dec/05/2008 at 11:49am

Hi Mike,


Your Smart-UPS 1500, it carries the part number SUA1500? What happens when you switch to generator power, does it automatically go to battery?

Have you looked at the power input settings through PowerChute? What voltage is coming in from the generator?


Let me know,



Thanks,
Tony

This problem is more common than you think when you use the low end generators which can produce out of tolerance power.

Originally posted by arwendt Toddy, Thanks for the post but  how could the average consumer tell if a UPS will provide the level of power line conditioning necessary to run from a low end generator?

Hi,


The Smart-UPS series of APC UPSs are generator compatible. You have to be careful with the lower end CS, RS, LS series. Most of those are not compatible with generators. Some of them claim they can, be performance is shoddy. If you have critical equipment, it's worth the extra money to invest in a Smart UPS. You're better off buying a Smart UPS 750 than a Back UPS LS700 anyday. The LS series will offer power backup protection but will obviously not compare to the Smart UPS in any way.


If you determine the requirement and do a bit of research online you can end up getting the Smart UPS's for a very good price. It's worth the investment for the added protection.



Tony

Originally posted by Tony-ExcessUPS Originally posted by arwendt Toddy, Thanks for the post but  how could the average consumer tell if a UPS will provide the level of power line conditioning necessary to run from a low end generator? Hi, The Smart-UPS series of APC UPSs are generator compatible. You have to be careful with the lower end CS, RS, LS series. Most of those are not compatible with generators. Some of them claim they can, be performance is shoddy. If you have critical equipment, it's worth the extra money to invest in a Smart UPS. You're better off buying a Smart UPS 750 than a Back UPS LS700 anyday. The LS series will offer power backup protection but will obviously not compare to the Smart UPS in any way. If you determine the requirement and do a bit of research online you can end up getting the Smart UPS's for a very good price. It's worth the investment for the added protection. Tony

Also, keep in mind that if you have a generator that kicks in within a minute or two of the power failure, you don't need to buy a big UPS for your system. You should size out a UPS that will provide you 3-5 minutes of run time. There's no point of buying a big unit that will provide you 20 minutes of run time when the most you will ever use if 2. The bigger the UPS, the higher the maintenance and the more expensive the batteries are.


Size things right and you get a really efficient operation.



T

How large a generator is required to run (for example) an APC SmartUPS 1400?