3DPrinting
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Noise! They are louder then you think.
Ability to mute the alarm.
Bonus points if you can connect it to a computer to automatically shut it down cleanly.
Optional, battery expansion out of the back
Keep in mind, UPS's should be in well ventilated areas, they can off gas hydrogen and other explosive fumes depending on the battery type
How safe is it to keep a lead acid battery UPS in a relatively/loosely closed space about the size of 8 of those UPSs?
A typical UPS uses sealed lead acid batteries. Those don't vent hydrogen unless something goes really wrong like severe overcharge or a short circuit.
Just make sure it has enough ventilation to keep it from overheating. They are usually around 80% efficient, so it will produce around 40 watts of heat with your load while it's on battery.
Ah, you’re right, it’s a gel battery. Good point on overheating. Thanks!
just have some ventilation so any hydrogen can escape (remember its lighter then air, so it will go up and out)
Didn't think about noise and that's important to me so thanks, is there anything special to look for the battery to make sure it can support my 3 devices at the same time? Like amp or other electric specifications?
Look for devices, and read their specification sheets. They will tell you how much wattage they can support and how long they can support it for. They might do it in different units you can convert to wattage.
Do you need your devices to stay on for prolonged periods of time off the battery? Or just long enough to shut down? That will have a huge impact on how expensive your UPS will be.
You can add up the wattage of all of your devices, and see what the maximum is. Or you can get a $3 power meter and measure it empirically. Most UPS's will set off an alarm if you're drawing more power than they could support if they had to switch to the battery
Power outages are usually very short (few seconds max). Are fanless ups ok or should I stay away from it. The one I'm looking out at the moment is Eaton Ellipse eco 500
If you only need it to skip the power outage, I would look at something in the range of 800W to 1000W in an online ups.
This wattage should run your devices for 5 minutes or so, as you have quoted them. The online UPS will always run its load off on the battery, so there is no swap over time. Other types will be fine for a PC or normal electronics, but the hitch in power could cause a defect in the 3D print.
Thanks
Fanless is great, they are quiet.
Usually the fanless ones have power power restrictions, or only kick in when the power goes off
A note on noise in case there is some misunderstanding.
The UPS is silent during normal operation (at least, all of them I've ever seen are, maybe super heavy duty ones will have a cooling fan but I've never seen one and even that can't be too loud), the only time it will make noise is when the power goes out and it switches to battery or if you are pulling too much power to keep the battery fully charged it will beep to warn you.
If you are expecting a few outages that last a few seconds, you probably don't need the beep warning, so as the other person said a mute option would be nice as the beep is usually very loud, my first UPS did not have this option so I just opened it and cut the lead to the speaker..
I will look for a fanless ups as I'm kinda sensitive to noise and everything is setup in my living room..., I will make sure I have the mute option available.
Another small note regarding fans, I've never actually seen a UPS with a fan before I just figured there's probably some out there, if you're looking at something and it doesn't say anything about being fanless or silent or anything I'd just assume it doesn't have a fan.
even though i think that the psu of the 3d printer might get you over the switching time offline usv's have, i'd go with an online usv (voltage & freqency independent)
one missed step and your print might be gone.
depending on your outages you might go for a smaller battery, because you'll have to replace them more often with an online usv.
First time I heard of online usv (also English isn't my main language), will have to check this out
mine neither.
that's why i wrote usv, it's the german equivalent.
i meant online ups.
Please don't confuse a generator with a ups. Ups isn't meant to run devices for long periods. Generators are
Should have added in my post that power outage don't last more than a few seconds so ups should be fine
Whatever would support the combined max wattage of the devices you will connect to it. Ideally something that can handle 50-100% more power. You can control some UPSes via USB or network, so you can hook it up to that mini pc or Pi (why are they separate?) and run NUT on it. You could technically pause a print/shut down a computer/Pi if an outage is more than x seconds to reduce power usage and get through one that you otherwise couldn’t.
"why are they separated", not sure what you meant, mini pc is acting as a server for a few usage and pi is dedicated to klipper.
Yeah, that explains stuff. I thought you might have had some stuff on Pi that you could’ve been running on the PC. In that case I’d recommend that you run the NUT on RPi, and set it to pause print on a power failure, possibly change CPU scaling (i.e. to “powersave” CPU governor if you’re running Linux) on the mini PC, or even possibly shut it down in an event when the power outage lasts longer than a minute.
Actually I could even run Klipper on mini pc but would need a very long usb to reach printer and thought it wasn't ideal. As for the mini pc, I'm running proxmox but I'm far from being an expert so not sure if I can manage CPU scaling.
I am too, and it is really easy to do so. Look up “Linux cpu governor”. NUT (which is the most common UPS management software for Linux) can execute commands, start timers at different events from UPS.
The biggest issue is battery size: If the heatbed cools down the print fails. The heating is the part that takes the most power so the battery has to be large enough to support the entire remaining print duration or power outage.
Shouldn't be an issue, power outage here are mostly about one second (5 at max) and even if my printer is being halted, my glass bed stick so much that my print don't pop off by themselves, I always use a scraper even when completely cool down.
I can’t help much on the power draw side of this question, but one thing to look out for with a UPS is some sort of communication option. (Usually NUT over ethernet, but there are some USB options too.) Most modern UPS brands will have a plugin you can install on your Raspberry Pi and Mini PC that allows your UPS to signal, “Hey, I’ve got 3% of battery life, you actually need to gracefully shut down now.” It’s mostly useful for NAS applications with spinning drives, but it could help save your Pi’s SD card potentially.
It’s a pretty standard feature these days, but the cheapest of the cheap will omit it.
I have nvme setup on my pi 4 (I know it's overkill for that purpose but already had pi setup like this prior to klipper), that being said I will definitely look at getting one with communication control even if power never goes down for more than a couple of seconds
You might actually want to consider a DJI Power 500 or 1000. They're actually portable power banks but can supposedly work in UPS mode, and will run for WAY longer than a traditional lead-acid battery UPS. See also Ecoflow's options.