Opti-UPS DS1500B Durable Series Uninterruptible Power Supply Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,589 words · ~7 min read
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Welcome to my unboxing of a product that if you guys are consumers, unless you
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are very high-end consumers, this may
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not be in the realm of sort of what you would buy, but if you're an SMB or if
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you are or yeah, once again, a very high-end consumer, something like this
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might appeal to you. So, I've done a couple UPS unboxings in the past on NCIX
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Tech Tips. We have done an episode about what is a UPS, what is what is the
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point. Um, however, we're going to cover a little bit of that again and we're
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going to cover a little bit of what makes this particular one special. So,
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this is a UPS from OPUPS. You can see it uses soft foam packaging. However, a
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fairly hard soft foam because these things are heavy. They are serious
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businessheavy because they have very very heavy batteries inside them that
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keep your computer running for minutes at a time in the event of a power
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outage. So, let's go through some of the accessories first before we get into a
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little bit more. We got phone line. So, that'll prevent surges from affecting
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your phone serial cable in case you actually still want to manage your UPS
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via serial. We've also got their Sentinel software included which is
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compatible with a wide variety of operating
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systems. We have a users guide for the
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durable series DS1000, 1500, 2000, and 3000. Okay. And
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let's go ahead and take this one out. So, the one we have here is the
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DS-1500B. It is, you know what, really heavy. Give me a sec, guys. So, the DS
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1500B can run for about 5 minutes on a
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full load, assuming that you are actually pulling 1,50 watts from it at
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the time that uh that the power fails or whatever else. So, in the event that you
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have a very high-end gaming machine or something hooked up to it and you're
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actually doing something intensive, you have video rendering in the background while you're playing a game, you
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actually have a few minutes to close everything down and then you buy
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yourself a little bit more time in order to shut down the computer properly
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because when it's at a 50% load, it can actually run for about 15 minutes, about
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14 minutes. So, I didn't mention before, but 1500 volt amps is basically
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equivalent to 1,50 watts. So, unless you have a really high-end computer, this is
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pretty much going to do it for you. It's also a double conversion design, which
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means that there is zero transfer time during a power outages, eliminating any
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possible downtime. Now, let's have a look at the unit physically. You can see on the back, we've got two groups of
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outlets. We've got a total of six outlets. We've also got a 15 amp circuit
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breaker. So, in the event that you actually overload the unit itself,
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although I'd imagine I mean it's it's a
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I guess if you're doing a pure pass through, you could actually pull more than 15 amps from it, but 15 amps would
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be more than the actual capacity that it's able to sustain off the battery
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itself. So, you wouldn't really want to overload it any more than that, 150 W
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because you're not going to get the benefit should the power actually fail.
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which isn't to say that you don't get any benefit from it if it doesn't
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provide a battery backup because this particular unit will actually clean the
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power that is going through it and can dynamically switch between battery mode
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which would be online mode and just a pass through mode in order to make sure
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that if there's some kind of fluctuation. For example, if you guys know what a brownout is, that's where
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the lights kind of flicker a little bit because the electricity in your house
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just goes a little bit wonky. Maybe someone turned on the microwave or the clothes dryer, whatever the case may be.
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This will completely protect the equipment that is connected to it by
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dynamically switching what mode it's in in order to make sure it's as clean as
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possible. It also will correct the power going through it and is compatible
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because it is a pure sinewave unit with any devices, even power supplies that
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use active power factor correction, which is pretty much any modern power
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supply. You can see it has an LCD readout on the front as well as a couple
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limited buttons. Not a whole lot here. Just giving you indications of the major
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things that can go wrong with it. It has a dynamically controlled fan, so in
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theory it shouldn't get too loud, although this is a serious piece of equipment and in general when you get
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past the consumer level stuff, you know, it tends to be not all that quiet. This
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is mostly recommended for use on things like servers, even medical equipment,
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boats, or like I said again, very, very
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high-end consumer stuff. It also has an optional SM SNMP card available, so you
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can do network and remote monitoring the up of the UPS via web browser. And check
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this out, emergency power route. It's taped down, so hopefully you won't
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accidentally hit it, but this will actually bypass any of the shutdown
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procedures that the UPS has if you go ahead and pull it out. We've got our
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serial port there. Remember, it had a serial cable with it. Although, I definitely figured that for most modern
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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
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still use serial as well. We've got our Ethernet in and out, as well as I think
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that's pretty much it for the
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back. So, I was complaining it was heavy before. Just so you guys know, it
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actually weighs about 40 lb. It has some other pretty cool features including
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managing the battery so it's at a 100% charge all the time as well as managing
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the battery in the event that it's running off of battery mode. So if the
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power fails or goes completely haywire in some kind of way that would damage
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your equipment. It actually prevents the battery from going completely dead which
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can damage it. Now I want to clarify something I said before. Sorry I said
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online meant it was running off the battery. I know online refers to the
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instantaneous switching in the event that it does need to run off of the
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battery. So, sorry about that. I think that pretty much covers everything that
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I wanted to say about this guy. One of the things that we're actually going to
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be using it for on top of protecting our equipment here in the TechTips lab is
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we're going to be using it to monitor power consumption when we do some of our
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videos where we're comparing the power consumption of various parts because the
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equipment that we've been using to measure it in the past has been pretty
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cheesy stuff like 15 bucks at sort of the local Walmart kind of thing. So,
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we're going to get away from that and we're going to start using this guy or one of its younger brothers, uh,
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depending on which lab we're working out of, in order to measure the power
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consumption that we're drawing from the wall. And the other effect that that
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will have is it will also clean the power it's delivering to the computer.
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So, it'll it'll protect us in the event of something like when we're flashing
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BIOSes and we corrupt a BIOS, which we've had happen because the power went
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out while we were doing it. We like freaked out. Fortunately, the board had a BIOS switch, so we managed to salvage
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the board. It'll protect us from that. It'll make our equipment last longer
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because we're delivering more stable power to it. And it'll also give us
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better readings because the wall power can fluctuate which will actually when
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the voltages fluctuate, it can actually affect the power consumption a little bit if the device is connected because
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there's some wonkiness involved in the conversion. Because this is going to
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clean it and provide exactly 120 volts output at all or 115 volts output at any
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given time. We should also get more stable numbers, especially when we're
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trying to do things like measure the idle power consumption or the load power
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consumption of a gaming machine. So, thank you for checking out this
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unboxing and don't forget to subscribe to L's Tech Tips for more unboxings,
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reviews, and other computer videos. And there's a couple things I forgot actually. It has user replaceable
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battery. There's an available extended battery and in additional to the
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available like extended battery, you can also run an external battery so you can
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power the equipment that is plugged into it for hours at a time.