All, I have my key systems at home on three UPS battery backups, two TrippLite 900s and a CyberPower 675, all with USB ports for notifying the protected systems of a power failure. I have two questions related to this:
Is there a way, using these or other UPS units, to constantly monitor input line voltage and length of outages? I recently had three outages within a week and they seem to have been preceded each time by a few hours of low input voltage (112v-114v) but I'd like to verify that and/or possibly preemptively power down noncritical systems to extend the length of battery coverage. Power quality monitoring would be nice, but my searches seemed to indicate that quality monitoring is much more expensive, and I could find nothing specifically saying that a UPS or quality monitor would report real-time to a computer (specifically SUSE 10.2 or Ubuntu 8.04). Also, is there a way to monitor the power draw of a set of devices (say, plugged into the same power strip and monitor the total) or individual device for the purposes of capacity planning for UPS units, akin to a Kill-a-watt device but with some sort of ability to report its data to a desktop? I have noticed a surprisingly large difference in how long two identical UPS units will last with seemingly similar device loads and would like to be able to determine how large a unit I would need to provide a certain amount of time of backup based on my measurements of average length of (and time between) outages, factoring in recharge times at a given input voltage. I have been looking at getting some new or larger UPS units, and I've noticed there is a nonlinear relationship between price and capacity, which makes me wonder why a person would not buy two or more smaller units and daisy-chain them to get higher capacity and redundancy. Thanks.
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