Surge protectors and UPS systems

TidBITS Talk
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I Am Not An Electrical Engineer, but I think we can divide this into different cases:

  • Power system over or under voltage
  • Power out (long time)
  • Momentary power outage
  • Lightning strike on power lines
  • Lightning strike at residence

Even if in some country you have no issues with the first 3, you still have the lightning strike risk.

In the US a lightning strike on power lines gets shunted to ground, so you’ll see a momentary outage (like a second or so). So, that’s not a surge.

But the last one – lightning strike at residence – is the real problem. Assuming your residence has no lightning rods, either you could have a hit that energizes the power line into the home, or you could have one that energizes the ground and then it sneaks in that way. Either way, that’s the risk the surge protector is designed to mitigate.

(and there’s also hits that energize other cables into the house, such as antenna cables or cable internet)

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I’d say the history and development of the electric utility industry in the US has resulted in the current fragmented, uncoordinated, and unreliable system. I also don’t view public or private ownership to be a solution to reliability and safety problems. Each form of ownership has significant flaws and opportunities for corruption.

In my area, the private utility is bad but the local government has demonstrated, over decades and in many departments, it would be a far worse manager of both the infrastructure and daily operations. Even its “oversight” of the utility is incompetent and corrupt.

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APC dominates the consumer and nuch of the AV market through sheer exposure. I won’t spec their products in my professional installations because I have had too much trouble with them over the years.

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Sorry, I did not mean to sound judgemental. I’m just frustrated by how companies use marketing and obfuscation to sell products because people ARE concerned but don’t know how stuff really works. That’s always the case with technology, and as tech gets ever more sophisticated it keeps getting worse. Nobody can know everything about everything, and it’s hard to find companies and products that truly do what they say, without playing games.

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Just my two cents: I was a Cyberpower authorized reseller about a decade ago, so there may be some bias. I found that I was installing and replacing many APC units at my F/T job and with my off-hours consulting work.
APC seemed to be problematic below its enterprise products (SmartUPS 1000VA and higher). While servicing a residential home, three APC units all died the same weekend after a storm. While the devices attached weren’t affected, replacing just the batteries resulted in zero op. That was costly and the pivotal moment to move to another brand: Cyberpower. They were less expensive for consumer models and had LCD display of info, where APS had an LED or no info. So, for my graphic-design customers, I would recommend a UPS for their networking, their workstations, print servers and for their entertainment setups.
Cyberpower had true sine filtering, along with boost for brown out or lost leg (think buckboost). I was a true believer when I was gaming and isolated in a basement (hmmmm?) from a storm raging above. The power would go out intermittently, several times a minute or hour, but my game console, my network and my display all were uninterrupted.
With more dependence on information like access to the internet, and power still not reliable, even in the year 2025, its almost a no-brainer to have a few 1300VA UPS that serve surge and backup to critical electronics (switches, modems, ONT-fiber, desktops, external drives and displays…). Some UPS also have USB ports so when power is out for extended time, you can charge a phone or other device. And remember that even if you are on a gas/propane generator, there is still a moment that the “generac” has to startup and spin up voltage and switch over…so being on a UPS or even better, on solar/battery home, can be positive solution to uninterrupted power.

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I have a number of UPS systems throughout my house, wherever I have critical electronic equipment. For the OLED TV, I had to ensure it was a true sine wave UPS, but most of my devices aren’t that picky. I have a mixture of CyberPower and APC - I think I prefer CyberPower, as the batteries seem to last longer. The biggest reason for a UPS over a SPD is to minimize issues with brownouts and quick, transient outages (my neighborhood seems to be served by two substations, because we’ve had times where the power goes out and comes back on within a minute, but the neighborhood on one side or the other stays dark - not sure why, but I’m thankful). It’s been rare to have an outage long enough for the batteries to become exhausted (it was more frequent in IL - I’d seriously considered a whole-house generator there, but here in NC I think we’ve only had one major outage in 12 years).
I have one protecting the fiber jack, the firewall, the MoCA device, and the distribution switch. Another (sine wave) for the OLED TV and my wife’s PS/5, along with the AppleTV. Then multiple upstairs for the networking equipment, the mac minis, the external drive arrays, etc.
I had equipment fail in IL before I started investing in the UPS devices. As far as I remember, I haven’t lost anything that’s been plugged into a UPS.

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Since the discussion seems to have drifted off surge protection and on to backup power, has anyone looked at power stations such as Ecoflow? They claim fast switching times similar to a UPS, sine wave output, very fast recharge time, and the ability to use a solar panel for charging. Seems like a good option.

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This is certainly interesting, and something I hadn’t looked at. Once I moved to NC, we haven’t had enough of an outage for me to look at generators or whole house storage options, but this is definitely something I want to investigate.
I’ve had several people recommend the Tesla Powerwall, which seems similar, but I wasn’t planning to really look at it seriously until we retire (in the neighborhood of 5-6 years). We will want to downsize and possibly move to a new area, and I was thinking about putting solar and some kind of a whole house backup supply in at that point.
I could certainly see the Ecoflow stuff as an interim (or permanent) option. I’ll have to do some research.

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I can’t recommend them. I bought a “small” 3,000-watt unit for camping when it was on sale at Costco for $900 (normally hundreds more). I had vague plans to use it in a campervan project – but that took longer than I thought and I didn’t get to it until last summer, two years later. I was literally building the van around that particular battery, which had enough power for me to run off-grid for days. But when I went to test the battery, it was completely dead! It was so dead it wouldn’t even recharge. The screen would not light up and none of the buttons worked. Keep in mind this is brand new, never-used (other than some initial testing when I first got it).

Ecoflow’s customer support was poor. They made me jump through all sorts of hoops, refused to believe what I said, and made me send them a video showing me trying the various “reset” steps (which didn’t work as the unit had no power at all so the video was pointless). Each of these exchanges took several days to a week for a response, and finally they were just “send it back to us.” This is a unit that weighs 46lbs! The shipping cost would have been outrageous and taken forever as you can’t send batteries by air (ground only). I also didn’t have the original box any more and it sounded like any repair or replacement would take weeks.

For such an expensive product, I expected a lot more – such as cross-shipping me a replacement and letting me return the bad one.

By this time nearly a month had passed and I was too frustrated to deal with them any more. I couldn’t finish my camper build without knowing the size of the battery (I was building a compartment to hold the battery). I also didn’t trust Ecoflow’s equipment, for what kind of device just stops working when it’s never even been used? What if it died or acted up while I was camping? Since I’d bought the unit at Costco, I just returned it there – and they gave me all my money back with no questions, even though it was over two years since I’d purchased it.

The Ecoflow was actually overkill for what I needed, so I bought a smaller 1000-watt BLUETTI brand ($500) that has worked flawlessly for me. It’s powerful enough to run my induction hot plate for cooking and do everything I need. Unplugged, it keeps its power for months, it charges fast, and has a great interface. (You can even control it via a phone app, though it drains the battery to keep it connected to your phone, so I don’t find it too useful.)

Granted, this was a smaller, “portable” battery, not the kind you’d use for whole-home. Maybe those are more reliable (they are 3-10x more expensive), but I don’t trust Ecoflow at all after my experience. The whole idea of emergency backup power is you want the battery to be ready when you need it – and Ecoflow support criticized my not using the battery for two years, as though that would somehow damage it. The battery draining over time is one thing; but why would that cause it to not recharge? I would think a whole-home battery would be even more prone to lack of use!

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Thanks for the feedback on Ecoflow as a company. In investigating the LiFePo4 battery technology I found that they will be permanently damaged if left in a low charge state. I wouldn’t expect this to be a problem in an UPS application but it is something to be aware of.

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All lithium rechargeable batteries - whether in a UPS or laptop or phone - become unchargeable if allowed to drain below a minimum level.

Battery packs normally include protection circuits that prevent overcharging (which can lead to catastrophic failure, including fires) and draining below the point where charging is possible.

But if a battery is in storage for two years (as @xdev reported for his case), and has not been connected to mains power at all during that time, it may well have self-drained below that recharge threshold.

Now, if the battery was mostly charged (manufacturers typically recommend 50-80% for long-term storage) and the unit was powered off, one can argue that it shouldn’t have drained that low. But not knowing any technical details, I can’t say if that’s a reasonable claim or not.

I do know that UPSs ship with the battery disconnected. This is for compliance with shipping regulations, but I wonder if that may also be necessary to prevent self-draining caused by the unit’s power monitoring circuitry being active the whole time.

@xdev: Did you have to connect the battery pack when you first set it up? And did you disconnect it before putting it away for two years afterward? I suspect the answer to the latter is no, since you probably didn’t expect it to be that much time. I’m not trying to assign any blame here, but I’m wondering if that might have been a factor.

When installed for such an application, it would be connected to mains power all the time, in order to keep the battery at 100% for when it is later needed (during an outage). So it would never drain to 0, except during a prolonged outage, and in that case, it should cut off before going all the way to zero, to permit recharging when mains power returns.

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Sorry if I wasn’t clear. Even though I didn’t actively use the battery during that two-year period, I did plan to have it available for emergencies and I therefore had it connected to power during that time. My assumption was that it would have circuitry to prevent overcharging so it would be safe keeping it plugged in. It turned out I never had a power outage where I needed the battery, so I never used it.

When I went to install it in the campervan, I unplugged it from power. It should have been fully charged, but I don’t recall if the display said it was or not. At the time I assumed it was working and I was focused on the campervan I was building.

I hooked up various equipment to the Ecoflow to see how power loads worked with it and I remember noticing the battery was drained. I had not used it much – just a few minutes with various items to see how much power they used. When I saw the Ecoflow was low on power, I plugged it into an outlet and yet it continued to discharge. I did not realize it wasn’t charging. It went all the way to nil and the next day it would not recharge no matter what I did. The Ecoflow engineers seemed unable to explain this. They said a “reset” was required, but the unit was so dead it would not respond to any button pushes, so a user reset wasn’t possible.

They told me I should not have left it plugged in for those 18 months! I was like, “Wouldn’t I want it at 100% if I had a power outage and needed the battery?”

Like you mentioned, they recommended charging to 50%-80% and then unplugging it for storage. That baffles me, as what good would that be in a power outage?

I don’t recall. I don’t think so. I’ve used many UPSes and I have connected those batteries. But I don’t think I’ve ever had to do that with one of these kinds of battery packs (I have several sizes, from various makers, such as Jackery and Massimo). But it could be it was such a minor procedure that I did do that and just forgot. (BTW, I did buy it via Costco online, not in the store, so it was originally shipped to me.)

Except that’s what Ecoflow seemed to think caused my problem!

In any case, my real issue is not so much with the hardware. I’m baffled by what went wrong as I’ve never had an issue like that with any other battery pack, but maybe the unit was defective. That happens. I don’t hold a grudge.

I even bought a second Ecoflow during Prime Days – a smaller unit that was supposed to go 1200 watts at peak – and it would not power my induction hot plate at 600 watts. It would shut off immediately. I returned that one to Amazon and bought the Bluetti, which worked just fine at 600 watts. (Though the Bluetti was rated at 1200 peak, it would not power the hot plate at 1200 watts, as I expected, as it is only rated for 1000 watts. it can do higher briefly, but not for more than a few seconds. For my needs this is just fine – it only means it takes a little longer to boil water, not a big deal. I think it was seven minutes at “medium” power instead of five at max. I only use the hot plate for cooking off-grid, which is rare, as I usually camp where electricity is available, this was acceptable to me.)

My real complaint about Ecoflow was their poor customer service, especially with such an expensive unit. To take weeks to diagnose the problem and conclude it has to be returned, an even longer progress, did not fill me with joy. And since the unit didn’t work after being plugged in for nearly 2 years, that worried me about how reliable it would be during an actual power outage. I know I periodically checked on it and tested it and the display seemed to indicate it was charged and everything was fine – so how would I have known it would fail when I tried to use it? In a real power outage, if I was counting on it, it could have been a disaster.

(My theory, though I can’t prove it, is that even though I had it plugged in, it wasn’t topping off the charge. As the battery drained over 18 months, it never bothered to recharge, and eventually the battery drained so completely it couldn’t recharge. But I really have no idea and Ecoflow support didn’t either. And if they are accurate about keeping it plugged in as being a problem, that’s really dumb and probably a fatal flaw with their design. My other idea is that maybe it was a defective unit that had a problem with the recharge circuitry. Maybe it never did charge properly. Since I didn’t use it other than a few tests, it could be I didn’t realize it had a problem.)

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I was talking about what happens in Australia; not Austria. Australia is not in Europe.

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The building codes do not mandate surge protection on residences in Australia and there is little demand by consumers to have them installed. But there are plenty of suggestions from electricians looking for business. Surge protectors might be installed in regions with high lightning strikes such as the tropics. The only requirement is for circuit breakers on the supply panels for short circuits on the load side.

I was just being a little facetious about the underpowered US volts.

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Ow. Definitely a design defect. Although leaving it on mains power all the time may not be great for battery life (although their power management firmware should be designed to deal with this, just like Apple’s battery-powered devices do), it shouldn’t result in what you experienced.

My guess is similar to your theory - something (have no clue what) glitched the power-controller firmware, so it stopped charging altogether and started running off of the battery despite the presence of mains power. Although a reset might have fixed it, you didn’t know until after the battery had drained below the cut-off voltage, and after that, there’s no return.

And, FWIW, the unit should perform periodic self tests where it switches to battery, monitors power levels, then switches back to mains and monitors charging. My Smart-UPS units do this every two weeks. On failing a test, it should alert you and maybe reboot itself.

But all that having been said, their customer service response was, as you wrote, unacceptable.

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I have a related comment about batteries dying. Our neighborhood was used as a test environment for the US Dept. Of Energy, NV Energy and UNLV. Part of that was the installation of 10 whole house batteries - some Sun Verge and some Tesla. One of the houses with a battery was sold and the original owners turned off power to the house - the new owners didn’t turn it back on immediately. The battery died (apparently it discharged completely). NV Energy replaced the batteries. My house (with the SunVerge battery) is up for sale now but I have left the power on and will warn the new owners to turn on power. (My experience with the battery is that the benefits were way less than the cost (NVE told me the cost was around $30K at that time). I have noted in other posts that our power here is very reliable, so the backup was never used.)

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Thanks, David - this is helpful. I’m not planning to do anything for probably another 5 years, give or take, and almost certainly not in this house - but I’ve been seriously considering a whole house battery like the Tesla (based on some comments from others). Will need to definitely take a closer look at overall cost/benefit. Same with solar - I don’t want to put solar on the roof here (even though we get virtually uninterrupted sun much of the time, with no trees or obstructions) because I don’t trust it not to damage the roof (I have had to replace roof shingles a number of times due to wind). If I do solar, I’m planning to do that during the building process, so that it’s designed for the purpose. I have a friend building a “semi-off-the-grid” house (on the grid, but capable of running off of the grid), and that’s what he’s done. Hopefully the technology will continue to improve.

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My house has a small solar system using “solar tiles” which embed into the roof. The (Pulte) homes were built to meet the LEED Platinum energy efficiency standards at the time (2011) and the costs were subsidized by the three sponsors. I was told that Pulte would never have been able to make money given the costs of construction. The house is on a time of use schedule from NVE - Winter rates are low, but in the summer the rates go up (a lot) between 4PM and 8 PM. In theory, the battery could be charged early in the day and then power the AC during the Peak period - but I think the direct/alternating current conversions are going to reduce the efficiency. I also have a Electric Vehicle (lower) rate between Midnight and 8AM and I considered changing the battery charging schedule to charge then, but did’t get around to it - and now that house is up for sale. The new house is bigger and isn’t insulated as much so I am thinking about Solar. This is Las Vegas and we have hot summers. I think maybe Solar has the best return on investment if you are going to stay at that house for many years.

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This thread has raised a lot of issues for me.

surge suppressors

Way back in May 1988 I did a deep dive into surge suppressor technology and then wrote a comparison review for MacWorld titled They Can’t Hurt where I tried to make the case that you need to spend real money if you actually feel you need an effective surge suppressor. I suspect that’s still the case almost 40 years later. Still, the piece ended up being quite controversial.

I have lived in various parts of the US – rural, suburban, urban; publicly owned vs. “investor owned” utilities; house wiring from knob-and-tube to state-of-the-art. I have always owned a lot of traditionally sensitive electronics – audio gear, musical instruments, amateur radio equipment, minicomputers, briefly an IBM 360 (408 volt 3-phase power), many servers, desktops, laptops, and the occasional television set. I’ve been through many power outages and a few lightning strikes. I have never, to the best of my recollection, lost a piece of equipment due to power issues. I haven’t used high-end surge suppressors but probably most always had my equipment plugged into a power strip which probably had a $2 MOV in it. I’m not at all saying that there isn’t a legitimate need for surge suppressors, and it’s almost certainly the case that I’ve been lucky (one of the lightning strikes split a utility pole about two meters from my bathroom window, and I was using an electric razor at the time). That is my experience, though, and I think it’s a useful data point.

I should probably also point out that I always had lightning arrestors on my radio antennas and was fairly fanatical about grounding things.

UPS

I have run a server farm out of my home since the late 1990’s. At one point I had almost 100 servers running (I remember thinking about buying a handful of Raspberry PI’s to round out the number). I often had much of the gear running on “uninterruptible” power supplies. I always kept a couple of servers connected directly (well, probably through an MOV-equipped power strip) to mains as canaries that could alert me when the UPS systems were in play. At the end of the day…

I have had more downtime from poorly designed and/or faulty UPS systems than I would ever have had from power failures or other grid faults. By a factor of at least ten.

I could (and here I did) wax eloquent about the many problems I’ve had with UPS systems. I am not a fan.

power stations

I got a really good deal on an off-brand 2,500 watt 2 kilowatt-hour portable power station. About $500 IIRC. I bought it completely on spec, then a year or two later moved to an off-grid home in Hawaii. For a few months, we were running exclusively on generator power and the power station was an absolute godsend. It is so useful and great that I tried to buy another one, but finding one on the island is a challenge in and of itself and when they do show up they’re north of $2,200.

backup generators

I think I now have enough solar power that I’m unlikely to ever need my backup generator, but over the years I have learned that it is essential to test them frequently, and under real-world load conditions. I’ve tested mine several times since I brought the big solar plant online, and it all worked fine – until we had a dark, stormy day and had been driving the electric car a lot. With a real load, the backup failed. Just like your backup files, test your backup power under real-world conditions.

Remember, also, that when the grid fails it often doesn’t fail cleanly. Flipping off your grid-connected breaker in no way simulates the fits and starts of a grid going down and reconnecting.

Tesla Powerwall

I bought Tesla solar and a Powerwall many years ago. I would never buy anything from Tesla ever again, regardless of how I might feel about the antics of the CEO. The company acted unscrupulously. That could just have been a bad apple (apparently, though, there are many), but they also require that you maintain an internet connection for your Powerwall at all times, and they control how and when you can use it. For example, they wouldn’t let me load-shift (charge from the grid during off-peak hours so that I could run from battery during peak hours). They wouldn’t explain why, but later (after I’d sold that house) entered into a deal with the “investor-owned” utility where they would allow load-shifting. I’m guessing that they directly or indirectly profited from that deal. Bottom line: you can pay for a Powerwall, but you don’t own it or control it, Tesla does.

The Powerwall otherwise worked well, but when grid failures occurred, the transition from grid to Powerwall was not smooth enough to keep servers from crashing. Again, if I just switched the breaker, it would work fine, but the grid dying was dirty enough to reset things even with the Powerwall in play.

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60

I haven’t lost any computers due to power outages, but I have lost a lot of productivity.

Today, my work computer is a laptop, so its battery is enough to carry me through most outages (although I still lose the two external displays and the Linux PC I remotely log-in to).

My main Mac at home has a UPS because I really don’t want to lose work in progress, should the power go out while I’m working on something. The ability to finish a task for 30 minutes during an outage and then gracefully shutdown is worth a lot to me. This doesn’t happen more than once a year, but when it does, I appreciate it.

I do get quite a bit of shorter outages - sometimes only for a second or two. And I really appreciate having the UPS for that as well, since there is often an open session for something, even when I’m out of the room or asleep. It’s nice to not lose any of it.

That having been said, all of my units have failed eventually, and when they did, the result was really annoying. The typical symptom of a failed unit is a sudden cut-off of power in response to the slightest power glitch, even one so small that unprotected devices were unaffected. When that happens, I complain a lot, disconnect the unit and go order a replacement.

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