I’ve had a longstanding issue that the Cyberpower UPS that I have attached to my Synology NAS has never worked properly. Whenever the power went out (thankfully not all that often) the UPS just doesn’t U at all. It’s a very interruptible uninterruptible power supply. It’s also something I’ve never really wanted to test too much because I have so much data on the NAS and I’d really rather not start yanking out the power and risk some sort of data corruption while testing (not sure what sort of testing I can do other than pulling out the power from the wall to the UPS.
The weird thing is that I have the UPS connected to the NAS with a USB cable (which does all the fancy monitoring and let it shut itself down when the power goes low or under various circumstances.
So yesterday when the power went off for a couple of minutes when the wind went crazy I wandered in to yell at it and noticed for the first time in the multiple years that I’ve had this thing that on one side the 4 sockets are labelled “Surge” and the other side are labelled “Battery/Surge”.
So for multiple years, I’ve had the $150 UPS (with a replacement battery last year because I thought it was the battery) being no more useful than a $10 powerbar that has surge protection.
[Insert galactic sized facepalm here]
I also took the time to look at the other UPS that I have that’s plugged into my desktop setup. THis one is completely overloaded – my computer, monitor, wifi thingy, switch, ISP router, multiple external drives, a USB hub, plus whatever other random stuff I plug into the power bar that’s plugged into it.
That UPS just doesn’t seem to work at all, so I swapped it with a UPS that my buddy passed over to me. This wasn’t any newer, but it’s still got battery power left and also has a USB connection so my desktop can use the same fancy “shut down when battery at X percent” technology. This one I did test, and it does seem to work as advertised. The battery isn’t great and doesn’t last a huge long amount of time, but since the power outages here generally last only a few minutes, fingers crossed this new setup will do well for me.
Now the next thing to do will be put back everything the way it was, re-wrap extra cable, and of course clean out all the dust bunnies and dirt out from under my desk…