Posted inInformation Technology / Thank You Sir May I Have Another

I Will Never Buy a CyberPower UPS Again

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek

Yes, I’m in that part of Illinois which still doesn’t have grid power due to the tornadoes we had yesterday. Living out in the country I’m pretty used to third world service from CommEd. Myself and my family have owned many different generators over the years. I can tell you Kholer makes the absolute best stand-by generator on the market.

I can also tell you the best generator with a wheel kit to purchase is this no-name kind of thing Northern Tool and Equipment was selling in 1999. I kid you not, it had an ACME diesel engine on it. I had visions of myself as Wile E. Cyote when I un-crated it but I have to say it’s the best portable generator any of us have owned and the last one we ever bought. During the ice storm which caused a week long power outage several years ago it ran non-stop and powered my office while I worked a remote contract. It sat outside in the bad weather and just kept running. I turned it off once per day to check the oil then started it right back up. I even had to beat ice off the cap to put fuel in it. Since we installed the stand-by at this place it is over at my brothers. It is big enough to run his hole house.

What I have learned over the years is those “low cost” generators are simply cheap. When you really need them they do not last. Very few of those “low cost” generators can run for a week straight being stopped once per day to check/add oil. Even the “low cost” ones which advertise “low oil shutdown” as a feature simply don’t last.

Today I learned the difference between “low cost” and cheap when it comes to a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply.) I have two CyberPower 1350 UPS systems. One of them I just purchased in June because my APC Back-Ups 1000 was getting old. This morning, while running on stand-by generator power my system crashed three times inside of an hour. Both CyberPower UPS systems are clicking and beeping and the one I had on this desktop computer simply halted power multiple times even though the display said it had more than half its battery capacity and only a quarter load. I moved my APC back to my desktop. It is quiet, it is continuous, it is reliable. Both CyberPower units are hooked to extremely light loads. One is running a 16 port router and the other is running a wireless range extender. Both are still clicking and whirring and from time to time even beeping. I didn’t really save any money purchasing CyberPower and I won’t make that mistake again.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.