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APC Back-UPS RS 700VA Master Control

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Part 1 – TED Signal Sink
After a week’s wait from ordering it, my UPS arrived on 2/19/10. You’re never quite ready for how heavy these things are. Yay Lead. After bringing it home, and plugging it into it’s new home, I immediately noticed something. My TED (Review) RDU stopped receiving a signal from the transmitter down in the breaker box. Just what I was afraid of since I’d read about things like this in the past. UPSes can act as X10 sinks (the TED uses something similar to X10 signaling to communicate). Basically, X10 (and the TED) communicate at 120khz and 132khz (respectively) on the power lines. UPSes have noise filtering build in that basically shunts all frequencies other than 50-60hz to neutral. So this basically acts like a “short” for those X10 and TED frequencies, thereby draining them out of that phase (or the house if I had a phase coupler), since energy flows the path of least resistance.

So, damn. I plugged the UPS into an outlet on the other side of the house (which is on another phase on my power system) so I could at least make sure it worked, and get it charged, and went about ordering an X10 filter (this one). Now I get to wait another week until that arrives before I can actually put this UPS through it’s paces.

Part 2 – Post Filter
The filter arrived on Friday, and after putting it between the UPS and the wall, my TED signal no longer “disappears”. The extra cool part is that by putting the UPS behind that, and all my computer equipment on the UPS, I’ve now removed a big source of “noise” that can interfere with the TED. But, this review isn’t about that.

UPS installedSo, I moved everything around in the office, and installed the Mini, Drobo, airport, cable modem, and LCD monitor on the “backup” section of the UPS. The laser printer, my weather station base, and the cordless phone are all installed on the non-battery backup section of the UPS. See the picture to the left. You’ll notice that all that stuff on the “battery” side of things, only draws 54w. Which means I’ll get about 40 minutes of backup time with that load. Running the CPUs at full load on the mini results in 75w of draw. Still very respectable. I believe if the Drobo was fully loaded, it’s supposed to draw upwards of 40w on it’s own, but I can’t imagine that’s the case given it’s current load.

Looking at how 10.6 sees the UPS, I’m quite happy. The only odd thing is the “unknown time remaining” up on the menu bar, but if you go into the Energy Saver system preference, you can see 100% charge, and set all the settings like, power back on after outage, spin down the disks, put the display to sleep, the computer to sleep, etc. As well as telling the machine to shutdown either after any of the following:

  • Being on UPS for x amount of time
  • When the UPS has x amount of time remaining
  • When the UPS charge is at x or below

Extremely cool. It would be cool if the UPS reported remaining runtime to the OS regularly, and maybe it does and 10.6 doesn’t know to look at it. But, it doesn’t overly matter. Just like on a laptop, you can’t see battery life remaining while you’re plugged into AC.

[xrr rating=9/10]The only problem with it is that it emits a high pitch clicking sound. I’m not sure if that will fade with time, or if it’s just a byproduct of the consumer level APCs. Searching online seems to indicate it’s not completely unheard of, but it is a bit annoying. If I ever have a problem with the UPS, I’ll certainly mentioned that issue when I go to have it serviced. But all and all, it’s a great investment, and it’s nice to have that “piece of mind” incase of a random power outage (though they’re rather rare in this area given underground power, and a reliable power company).

The Energy Detective (TED) 1001

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TED1001<Disclaimer>I will admit, first and foremost, that this review is a bit later than I would have liked. Since the time I started wanting to review the TED 1001, the 5000 has been released that offers a few major advantages. Mainly, bang for your buck. The TED 5000 allows you to upload power data to Google Powermeter, which gives real time power graphing, much like I had to hack together on my own on my website here. With all that said, let’s get on with it.</Disclaimer>

The TED 1001 is probably the first widely available whole house energy monitor device that allows someone to see how much power their home is using instantly (1 second time resolution). The display unit is accurate to 10W. Very few items in the house draw less than 10W when they’re on, so this will generally give you a pretty good idea what kind of power your home uses.

Installation of the TED is fairly simple, if not hair raising. The CTs have to be installed around the primary power feed for the breaker panel. Which, unless you have a master shutoff between the meter and the panel, or you pull the meter itself, means you’re potentially interacting with a 200AMP, 240V feed. But, you don’t actually have to touch those, and if you’re concerned, an electrician could do the job in about, 10 minutes, max. Once the CTs are installed, you hook those up to the MTU, and the MTU to a new breaker. The most difficult part of that is figuring out what phase to install the new breaker on, since it has to be the same phase as what the display is going to hook to. Which brings up basic home power…

Your home power is generally supplied by two 120V phases (why there’s the two big power feeds coming into your breaker panel). Combined, this gives us a 240V 2-phase system. If you look at a breaker panel, it kinda looks like two ladders on top of each other. One of these ladders is one 120V phase, the other is the other 120V phase. Normal breakers attach of just one of these ladders, and therefore supply 120V. Breakers for stuff like water heaters, stoves, HVAC, dryers, etc all connect to a “double pole” breaker, which connects to both ladders. So, you get 240V. So, those two phases that come into your house come from a transformer somewhere that breaks them out into single phase lines (power coming down the poles is much higher voltage, and usually 3-phase).

So, with that in mind, from breaker to breaker in your panel (going top to bottom on one side), you get alternating phases. So, when you go to plug in your MTU to a new breaker, you have to figure out what phase the outlet you plan to plug your display into is on. Otherwise, the MTU talks to the opposite phase, which goes out to the street transformer and then crosses to the other phase and comes back to the Display. Potentially hundreds of feet. This is bad. You can get a phase coupler that goes into your panel, or plugs into a dryer outlet, but it’s just easier to hook it to the right phase.

Once that’s all done, you can turn on that new breaker, and plug in the display. You should start seeing good data once you configure the TED display. It’s pretty cool all and all.

All things considered, if the 1001 was the only option from TED (assuming the 5000 was not yet released), I’d say BUY ONE! They’re a wonderful tool to figure out where and when you’re using power. If you want more specific power usage, pick up a Kill-a-Watt. You plug individual 120V items into them, and they’ll tell you how much power they’re using.

My biggest complaint about the TED 1001 is the cost of unlocking the USB port on them, $45. Thats even if you don’t use their software (which I don’t, I just use a Python script written by someone else).

[xrr rating=4.5/5]That .5 deduction is simply the cost of the unlock, mixed with how poor the software is (windows only, doesn’t help).

Here are some links of interest:

-TED 1001 Purchase : http://www.theenergydetective.com/store/teds/ted-1001.html
-Google Power Meter: http://www.google.org/powermeter/
-Energy Circle (great website about energy usage): http://www.energycircle.com/
-Youtube video showing install of TED 1001: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgcvvJPX46M
-Python Script to poll TED: http://www.staze.org/static/code/scripts/ted5.py (local mirror: http://www.staze.org/static/code/scripts/ted5.py)

Quick note

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So, just a quick note. I just updated the code for the power summary (which is on the left), and fixed the “current meter reading”. There were a couple issues, one of which was a bad sql query (not sure why the previous one didn’t work, but oh well), and for some reason, 2 days of data were missing (which you’d see if you clicked the “history”, and saw two “0” graph points.

Anyway, after fixing those problems, it turns out the “current meter reading” is dead on. I’m not sure how… and maybe it’s just a coincidence, but the meter reads exactly what the webpage says. Not too shabby. That means the drift for about 33 days is less than 1KWH, or less than about 300W per day, which given a 30KWH day, that’s less than 1% inaccuracy.

So, that’s it. Just thought I’d share. =) More actual interesting info later today, or tomorrow.