APC UPS

This post has more to it than showing off my APC UPS.

Its also a good excuse to show off my new 1 KVA APC UPS. I earlier had a Numeric 600 Plus earlier which was not very good. I wanted one with

• More backup (around an hour)
• Computer communication interface to get some cool information from it and also to initiate automatic shutdown in case of low battery.
• More output connections.

APC was the brand that came to my mind. I believe its the best UPS manufaturer. I always wanted to own a APC UPS. Its simply too good! It interfaces with the USB port on my computer. The software supplied by APC (Power Chute) does not support linux. But an open source software called apcupsd does the job brilliantly as you can see for yourself – I’ve posted some screen shots below. And, even Gnome – (the desktop environment I love because of its simplicity) has given one more reason to love it! It detected my APC UPS with zero configuration. It sits there in the system tray and  showed the remaining battery time, and other cool information!

Now to the interesting part – showing off what my UPS can do

Take a look at gapcmon (A GUI UPS monitoring software that comes along with apcupsd).

It gives the power consumtion in Watt. Cool isn’t it ? My inactive Core 2 Quad + 17″ TFT LCD system just consumes around 96 Watt.

Now lets see how power consumtion varies under various situations.

• All four cores used 100% by a simple program I wrote.

  int main() {
      fork();
      fork();
      while(1);
  }

  Power consumption increased by 36 Watt as seen below.

• Using my disk to the fullest by doing a

   dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null iflag=direct

  The iflag makes sure that data is read directly from the disk instead of the disk cache. And now the power consumption, increased by 2% – around 12 Watt.

• Next comes my 1Gbps Ethernet card. At full transfer speed (around 940 Mbps), power consumption increased by 12 Watt.
• The lowest power consumption ever recorded is 12 % – 72 Watt. Its by switching off the monitor.

All in all (ah yea, apart from software too!) , its a brilliant UPS. I really recommend it to all who are looking for a change!