Monday, October 03, 2011

Inverter/UPS purchase

After a terribly long break from blogging, I am back. To do public good, no less.

We just bought an inverter/UPS for the office thanks to the super unreliable BESCOM supply in Bangalore. We finally decided on an APC 850 VA, 100 AH tubular battery (from Relicell). Since we use it to mostly power laptops and the Internet modem/router, we haven't gone in for additional wiring - we plan to plug it all in using extension cords. I know the office will be all wire-y, but we are fine with it for now.

I realised how little good information there is out there to help people like me make an informed decision on the product and config to buy. Hence this post. Our thought process went as follows:
- We needed only laptops (3-4 at a time) and maybe 1-2 desktops (down the line). However, we wanted to plan for the future - hence the 850 VA one, not a 600 VA one.
- Tubular battery is the way to go - less maintenance, longer life. Everything else sucks.
- 850 VA supposedly translates to around 500 W (roughly 60% of the VA=W). Each laptop roughly takes around 60 W. Hence 4 laptops=240 W, which is 50% of what we have as capacity.
- The guy who sold it to us says 4 laptops should last 6 hours - we haven't tried that one out yet.