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Ultra 1200 Watt Backup UPS


Date
: 09/20/06 – 03:36:04 AM

Author
:

Category
: Power Supplies

Page 1 : Index

Manufacturer
: Ultra Products

Price
: MSRP $229.99

How often do you find yourself working late a night during a lightning storm madly hammering out a report or fragging some folks only to have the power surge or go out on your completely? For me, it's something that has happened more than once and on all those occasions I've had to redo my work and swore I would one day get a UPS for my machine. Ultra continues to engineer a variety of products and the ULT33046 is one fine example.

The Ultra ULT33046 is better known as the
2000VA 1200 Watt Backup UPS w/ AVR
. A UPS is essentially one enormous battery that can supply AC power to whatever you decide to plug into it. Ultra Product has a number of models depending on your specifications. The smallest is a 180 Watt unit and the largest is our 1200 Watt monster. We'll go through the ins and outs of this puppy and see how it holds up to my PC under different load conditions.

Page 2 : Package

The 2000VA 1200 Watt Backup UPS came in a very large and heavy box. At first I thought the size of the UPS would be this big since it was so heavy, but we'll soon find out what the true size is. There's a lot of detail on the package, but the vast majority of it is repeated on some of the other faces on the box. I'll only cover the original content and what you'd be reading if you were at a store.

The top of the box outlines what the unit does with a nice little picture of it towards the bottom right. We also see the $125,000 warranty offered by Ultra Products and the expected backup time of this particular unit. If you ask me, 80-90 minutes sounds like a very long time. I will be
very
impressed if the unit lasts an hour with my machine.

One side of the package gives a detailed list of the features and an image of what the LCD display looks like when active. While the display is pretty basic, it relays all the important information to you. We'll go over this in more detail later in the review.

A very important note is how long the warranty lasts, with the 2000VA 1200 Watt Backup UPS w/ AVR, the warranty is three years and some conditions will apply.

The other side of the package shows what the front and back of the UPS looks like. This will give you a good idea as to how many products you can plug into it and where the very important power button is.

Just a little below the images of the front and back side is a tiny list of specifications used solely for shipping and storage.

I'd hate to be the guy who has to carry this package around from the store to home. It's just shy of 17KG!

From the store to your house, one of the most important things to consider is the specifications. Let's jump to that next.

Page 3 : Specifications

It's quite easy to navigate your way around the Ultra Products website. They keep a constant list of new products and clearance items if you're looking for the hottest stuff around or just want to score a cheap deal. Honing in on the 2000VA 1200 Watt Backup UPS the specifications page we're presented with a wealth of information.

This is what Ultra Products has to say about their own product:

Next up we have a very detailed list of all the specifications.
Please click for a larger image.

Last but not least we have the features:

Ultra Products has also reproduced a few images of the UPS as well as a small screen shot of the software provided, we'll skip those for now as they'll be covered in the next page or two.

Page 4 : Package Contents

The first thing we'll do is open up this package and remove the UPS. As I mentioned earlier, I thought the unit would be pretty big given the size of the box and the weight. I was wrong. There was a lot of soft foam padding all around the box. I'd be confident in saying if this package hit the ground from a couple of inches, there'd be no damage to the UPS. Your toes might be broken, but that's a different story.

Inside the box I pulled out the power cord, a USB A-B cable and a RJ-11 patch cable. Given the industry Ultra Products serves, I think a RJ-45 patch cord would have been more useful.

The only other piece of equipment is the UPS. It was wrapped inside a thick plastic bag and we could see the manual and driver CD taped to the side.

The manual is quite short but does contain a lot of valuable information. It talks about the various operating modes, what the digital indicators mean and how to disable some of the alarms. Certainly worth reading and it'll only take you ten minutes or so.

With the contents now covered, we'll quickly go over the exterior and interior.

Page 5 : Exterior and Interior

There's not a whole lot to the exterior of the 2000VA 1200 Watt Backup UPS. For the most part, you'll only be interested in the front and rear of the unit, but we'll give you the big picture and cover everything.

Starting with the front of the unit we have two main features: the power button and the LCD display.

The LCD will indicate what modes are currently active, the current AC voltage and how much battery life is left. In the image above, you can see an outline of what will light up. The three smaller icons indicate whether or not the UPS is running off the AC line, the battery or if the unit is currently overloaded.

The rear of the UPS has a number of features worth looking into.

In addition to the AC input, we have a circuit breaker switch, a total of four outputs that have both battery backup and surge protection, two outputs that only have surge protection, RJ45/RJ11 protection and the USB connector. If you're wondering why there are two outlets that only have surge protection, the answer is simple. Some devices, like laser printers, draw large amount of power while printing but have low idle watt usage. These devices should still be protected but you'd never want to plug it into the battery backup because if someone accidentally prints while the AC power has been disconnected, you could easily overload the UPS and damage it or simply drain all the battery power in one go. Such devices should be protected by with surge only.

With the front and back ends of the unit covered, there's not too much more in terms of functional features you'll be concerned about. The chassis itself is made of steel and there's a lot of ventilation thanks to the holed side panel.

The feet of the UPS is made of thick rubber and held in place by a screw. These are fixed in place very well and should not slip on any surface.

Also found on the bottom of the chassis is a caution label. I find it interesting how Ultra warns you that the output is not sinusoidal but in facts carries a harmonic distortion. Its times like this I wish I had my oscilloscope from class!

Something you should never do to a UPS is open it up. Unless you're a trained professional, you don't be able to do anything even if you do crack the lid open. Needless to say, I opened it up anyways to give you guys a good look at the heart of the unit.

Starting with the front, we see two simple circuits: one for the power button and the other for the LCD.

Removing nearly a dozen screws allows me to remove the steel covering and get inside.

The circuit is quite clean and simple. I didn't find any fans so this means the unit is entirely passively cooled. Over the weeks that I've had this unit, I found the UPS never got hot, warm at best.

If you were to attempt anything inside the unit, it'd be to remove the battery and change them out because they were starting to die. While this is doable, I didn't find any specifications printed on the battery so it could become a challenging task for you. What I did find was this label indicating the part came from Chuan Shun Electric Industrial Co. LTD and has a temperature rating of 130 degrees Celsius. I can't say this makes too much sense to me.

Let's move onto the Installation of the 2000VA 1200 Watt Backup UPS as we do have some software features to go over.

Page 6 : Installation & Software

The physical installation is quite simple when it comes to utilizing the UPS. The first step is to plug in the main power to the UPS and press and hold the power button for less than one second. This puts the UPS into the "Green Mode". The Green Mode is set for light loads and will shut everything down after four minutes in battery mode. This can be changed later on.

The power button will light up white once pressed and the LCD display will become active.

The UPS arrives at your door fully charged and ready to go. You can see the full bars in the picture below.

Once in battery mode, you'll notice that the 116 V AC line will jump to the regular 120V.

Once you're in the Green Mode, proceed with plugging in your other electrical components. That included one 19" monitor and my Intel D930 ASUS machine. If you wish, you can also use the RJ45/RJ11 surge protection. The last connection I made was plugging in the USB from the UPS to my ASUS machine. I booted up to it and while it was detected by Windows, no installation occurred. I pulled out the driver CD from Ultra so I could now install their software.

I picked the Windows installation and a few clicks later, my system was updated to recognize the Ultra UPS.

One thing I did notice is that the UPS was still not recognized in the Power Properties page.

Firing up the software, a lot of information is presented to you. The main screen shot looks like this:

You can see the voltage, frequency, load and battery level on this one convenient screen. There is also a series of buttons running along the top of the interface that you can click and modify. Start from left to right we have: System Configuration, UPS Self-Test, UPS Communication Search, Schedule Setup, Record Viewer, Event Log, Pager Setup and Email Setup.

With the software all setup, it's time to get to the testing portion.

Page 7 : Testing

Testing the UPS will be done in a series of steps under two different conditions. I first let the UPS operate without any interruptions for 14 days. Chances are, the moment you buy a UPS the power won't go out. I used these 14 days to just let the UPS circuitry to work itself into a steady state situation. After the 14 days, I will pull the plug and time how long the system will stay operating before the system completely shuts down. I will use the Event Viewer to determine the start and stop times for full load conditions.

Let's first go over my systems:

With the processor fully stressed and the TEC drawing another 50 Watts for maximum cooling power, UPSMON reported 17% load on the system. As a side note, using the Extreme PSU Calculator, it recommends a 290W PSU but it'd really be closer to 340 with the extra 50W TEC. If we factor in the monitor, were drawing a good bit of power when the system is under full load!

The first time I pulled the plug on the batter my system lasted just under 12 minutes. I let the battery recharge for 24 hours, optimal time, before doing a second discharge. The same process was repeated 10 times. By the forth discharge the battery lasted five and a half minutes and all the discharges following that were the same. I tried recharging the battery for three or four days but that didn't increase the battery life. I had expected this type of behavior with the battery lasting the longest when it's fresh from the factory floor and slowly degrading to a steady state performance.

At five and a half minutes of battery life, it's not exactly what was advertised on the box. It's obvious that the type of system you have will have a direct impact on how long the battery lasts. Ultra Products used a relatively dated machine to get the 90 minutes record.

Under idle conditions, my system stayed online for a little over 11 minutes. This is more than sufficient to save all your important files and safely shutdown the machine when the power goes out.

Page 8 : Conclusion

Ultra Products has packaged together very complete product to keep your system running while the power goes out. For a UPS that'll bear up to 1200 Watts, the price you're paying makes it a steal. Anyone looking for something more than just a surge protector should grab one of these. Every so often there's a blip on the grid line that'll knock your system out even if you had a surge protector. This little puppy will make sure your system stays online.

Based on my machine specifications, I'm not disappointed with the performance the 2000VA 1200 Watt UPS provided to me. Five and a half minutes is more than enough to save all your work and power down your machine when the system is fully stressed and under idle conditions eleven minutes is plenty! If you really want something that'll last you hours and hours, you should invest in a power generator or get a model from companies like APC. Those models will have a longer battery life but they'll also cost you
significantly
more, up to a magnitude more. I don't think most people could justify paying something ten times what Ultra is charging to squeeze a little more battery time on a home server.

Advantages

Provides more system stability than surge protectors
Supplies enough wattage for most machines
Provides sufficient time to save work and safely shut the machine down during power failure
Significantly cheaper than other UPS models

Disadvantages

Doesn't provide the longest back up time

Overclockers Online would like to thank Ultra Products for making this review possible.