Cyberpower sells 12V UPS’s relatively cheap. They have alarm relays. Some of our Nokia CPE have an 8-pin molex power connector, and you can buy a cable or pigtail for it which is specifically for these types of UPS’s. Then in theory our management system would record alarms when the CPE is on battery, battery is low, battery is faulty, etc. The UPS could power a 12V router easily enough too.
We don’t do this, and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for all the batteries. The cheap Cyberpower units have a 7ah SLA battery, so 84Wh, and the voltage comes directly from the battery when the main power goes down. If I had two 10W devices I’d presumably get 4 hours on battery. I did use these at one time when we toyed with Mikrotik as a fiber ActiveEthernet CPE. I’ll say they power a little mikrotik switch all day long. In that case we just monitored the tik input voltage with SNMP and if it fell below charging voltage then we knew it was on battery. I have no simple/cheap answer for the multiple voltages. A desktop UPS is inefficient as you already noted. And any cheap UPS is a time bomb unless someone is going to maintain and replace the batteries because they’ll just shut down when they eventually have a battery failure. The Cyberpower DC unit is no exception. Unfortunately, I think a solution that would work reliably and cover all the use cases won’t be simple or cheap. Get Outlook for iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef> ________________________________ From: AF <[email protected]> on behalf of Ken Hohhof <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, May 1, 2025 8:34:22 PM To: 'AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group' <[email protected]> Subject: [AFMUG] UPS for Internet equipment Most people have phones, tablets and laptops that are battery powered, as well as security cameras like Ring and Blink. But unless they have a whole home generator, their Internet stops working if their Internet equipment (router, modem, ONT, radio, gateway, etc.) doesn’t have power. Have any of you found a UPS that fits this use case? Everybody wants to sell you an 800 VA battery backup with 30 minutes of runtime. It’s the old paradigm of powering your desktop computer long enough to save your work and shut it down. What we need is something that delivers 1/10 that much power for 10 times that long. Yes, I realize a big part of the problem is the inefficiency of DC/AC conversion especially at low power levels. And there have occasionally been DC battery backups for network equipment, usually for a specific model of CPE. But we are often faced with a radio that wants 24-30 or 48-56 VDC, and a WiFi router that wants 5 or 12 VDC. If this was for our own use, I could build something with some DIN rail electronics and a battery, but it wouldn’t be UL approved or appropriate for a customer to use in their home. People these days get alerted on their phone because their doorbell camera is offline, and they call their ISP rather than check for power outages. If they had a UPS for their Internet equipment, they would get an alert that their POWER was off. Ideally it would run for 8 hours which seems to be a typical restoral time for power companies. But I guess even with a couple hours they would at least know why their security camera is offline. And if they are home they continue doing stuff online for awhile and start planning where to go for public WiFi if the power outage lasts longer than their battery runtime.
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