Welcome to my unboxing of a product that if you guys are consumers, unless you
are very high-end consumers, this may
not be in the realm of sort of what you would buy, but if you're an SMB or if
you are or yeah, once again, a very high-end consumer, something like this
might appeal to you. So, I've done a couple UPS unboxings in the past on NCIX
Tech Tips. We have done an episode about what is a UPS, what is what is the
point. Um, however, we're going to cover a little bit of that again and we're
going to cover a little bit of what makes this particular one special. So,
this is a UPS from OPUPS. You can see it uses soft foam packaging. However, a
fairly hard soft foam because these things are heavy. They are serious
businessheavy because they have very very heavy batteries inside them that
keep your computer running for minutes at a time in the event of a power
outage. So, let's go through some of the accessories first before we get into a
little bit more. We got phone line. So, that'll prevent surges from affecting
your phone serial cable in case you actually still want to manage your UPS
via serial. We've also got their Sentinel software included which is
compatible with a wide variety of operating
systems. We have a users guide for the
durable series DS1000, 1500, 2000, and 3000. Okay. And
let's go ahead and take this one out. So, the one we have here is the
DS-1500B. It is, you know what, really heavy. Give me a sec, guys. So, the DS
1500B can run for about 5 minutes on a
full load, assuming that you are actually pulling 1,50 watts from it at
the time that uh that the power fails or whatever else. So, in the event that you
have a very high-end gaming machine or something hooked up to it and you're
actually doing something intensive, you have video rendering in the background while you're playing a game, you
actually have a few minutes to close everything down and then you buy
yourself a little bit more time in order to shut down the computer properly
because when it's at a 50% load, it can actually run for about 15 minutes, about
14 minutes. So, I didn't mention before, but 1500 volt amps is basically
equivalent to 1,50 watts. So, unless you have a really high-end computer, this is
pretty much going to do it for you. It's also a double conversion design, which
means that there is zero transfer time during a power outages, eliminating any
possible downtime. Now, let's have a look at the unit physically. You can see on the back, we've got two groups of
outlets. We've got a total of six outlets. We've also got a 15 amp circuit
breaker. So, in the event that you actually overload the unit itself,
although I'd imagine I mean it's it's a
I guess if you're doing a pure pass through, you could actually pull more than 15 amps from it, but 15 amps would
be more than the actual capacity that it's able to sustain off the battery
itself. So, you wouldn't really want to overload it any more than that, 150 W
because you're not going to get the benefit should the power actually fail.
which isn't to say that you don't get any benefit from it if it doesn't
provide a battery backup because this particular unit will actually clean the
power that is going through it and can dynamically switch between battery mode
which would be online mode and just a pass through mode in order to make sure
that if there's some kind of fluctuation. For example, if you guys know what a brownout is, that's where
the lights kind of flicker a little bit because the electricity in your house
just goes a little bit wonky. Maybe someone turned on the microwave or the clothes dryer, whatever the case may be.
This will completely protect the equipment that is connected to it by
dynamically switching what mode it's in in order to make sure it's as clean as
possible. It also will correct the power going through it and is compatible
because it is a pure sinewave unit with any devices, even power supplies that
use active power factor correction, which is pretty much any modern power
supply. You can see it has an LCD readout on the front as well as a couple
limited buttons. Not a whole lot here. Just giving you indications of the major
things that can go wrong with it. It has a dynamically controlled fan, so in
theory it shouldn't get too loud, although this is a serious piece of equipment and in general when you get
past the consumer level stuff, you know, it tends to be not all that quiet. This
is mostly recommended for use on things like servers, even medical equipment,
boats, or like I said again, very, very
high-end consumer stuff. It also has an optional SM SNMP card available, so you
can do network and remote monitoring the up of the UPS via web browser. And check
this out, emergency power route. It's taped down, so hopefully you won't
accidentally hit it, but this will actually bypass any of the shutdown
procedures that the UPS has if you go ahead and pull it out. We've got our
serial port there. Remember, it had a serial cable with it. Although, I definitely figured that for most modern
systems, you're going to be using USB, which isn't to say you won't use serial because there's a lot of stuff that does
still use serial as well. We've got our Ethernet in and out, as well as I think
that's pretty much it for the
back. So, I was complaining it was heavy before. Just so you guys know, it
actually weighs about 40 lb. It has some other pretty cool features including
managing the battery so it's at a 100% charge all the time as well as managing
the battery in the event that it's running off of battery mode. So if the
power fails or goes completely haywire in some kind of way that would damage
your equipment. It actually prevents the battery from going completely dead which
can damage it. Now I want to clarify something I said before. Sorry I said
online meant it was running off the battery. I know online refers to the
instantaneous switching in the event that it does need to run off of the
battery. So, sorry about that. I think that pretty much covers everything that
I wanted to say about this guy. One of the things that we're actually going to
be using it for on top of protecting our equipment here in the TechTips lab is
we're going to be using it to monitor power consumption when we do some of our
videos where we're comparing the power consumption of various parts because the
equipment that we've been using to measure it in the past has been pretty
cheesy stuff like 15 bucks at sort of the local Walmart kind of thing. So,
we're going to get away from that and we're going to start using this guy or one of its younger brothers, uh,
depending on which lab we're working out of, in order to measure the power
consumption that we're drawing from the wall. And the other effect that that
will have is it will also clean the power it's delivering to the computer.
So, it'll it'll protect us in the event of something like when we're flashing
BIOSes and we corrupt a BIOS, which we've had happen because the power went
out while we were doing it. We like freaked out. Fortunately, the board had a BIOS switch, so we managed to salvage
the board. It'll protect us from that. It'll make our equipment last longer
because we're delivering more stable power to it. And it'll also give us
better readings because the wall power can fluctuate which will actually when
the voltages fluctuate, it can actually affect the power consumption a little bit if the device is connected because
there's some wonkiness involved in the conversion. Because this is going to
clean it and provide exactly 120 volts output at all or 115 volts output at any
given time. We should also get more stable numbers, especially when we're
trying to do things like measure the idle power consumption or the load power
consumption of a gaming machine. So, thank you for checking out this
unboxing and don't forget to subscribe to L's Tech Tips for more unboxings,
reviews, and other computer videos. And there's a couple things I forgot actually. It has user replaceable
battery. There's an available extended battery and in additional to the
available like extended battery, you can also run an external battery so you can
power the equipment that is plugged into it for hours at a time.