Peter writes in –
Tiring of South Africa’s incessant power outages, Mike built his own super DIY UPS. It’ll run multiple computers for over 5 hours and protects them from power surges.
Beating brownouts: building a super UPS – Link.
8 thoughts on “Beating brownouts: building a super UPS”
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It seems like he could get even more life from his batteries if he skipped the AC and found dc-dc supplies for everything. Just about all his listed computer peripherals (if they are like mine) have an ac-dc converter. His setup is making square wave AC from 24 v DC then the adapters convert it back to various DC voltages for the peripherals. Thats two levels of loss that could be combined or eliminated with an all DC system.
What about the PC itself? And a CRT monitor? Are there DC supplies available for them?
I can see it now, geeks building this type of thing and wiring their homes up for DC along with AC, phone, cable, and ethernet…
here’s another DIY ups setup http://www.dansdata.com/diyups.htm and
http://www.dansdata.com/upsupgrade.htm
Taking these links into account, has anyone taken a deep cycle battery and used an old APC (or other brand) UPS as the inverter and charger? Not knowing a lot about this, it seems like I should be able to take an old Smart UPS 1500 (that I have lying around with dead batteries), re-encase the electronics of it, attach it to a deep cycle battery (of the proper voltage) and get some outstanding runtime! The two big issues would be ventilation and ambiance. The old electronics would keep the battery charged and be the automatic transfer switch/inverter when main power goes out.
Is this a new project or has someone already done this?