Posted: 2/8/2026 8:49:18 PM EDT
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We have regular power glitches (downside of living in the country) and my wife works from home, so reliable internet is required. I have a UniFi UDM SE with dual WAN (1G fiber and Starlink as failover) and E7 WiFi so I am already in the Ubiquity universe. I was in need of a UPS and saw that Ubiquity just released a 2U and a tower UPS. The 2U was sold out so I decided to buy the tower with the intention that I would move it to my wife's desk for her dual monitor setup and buy another once the 2U (or pro model rack mount UPS) came into stock. I got everything connected, charged, configured and it was running for a week before our first power outage. It was a short power glitch, less than a second, and we lost internet. I had the UDM SE paired for "safe shutdown", and it was completely off when I went to the server room to check. I only have a 60W load so the battery should last about an hour by my calculation. I had to unplug and replug the power cable to get the UDM to reboot. The E7 wireless access point powered by the UPS through POE was on, as well as the Starlink and fiber modem, only the UDM was off. I am not sure how the "safe shutdown" works, I assumed that the UPS would calculate the battery reserve left and shutdown the UDM after the battery got to some low percentage. I disabled that feature in case I am misunderstanding how it works. Does anyone have any experience with this (or the 2U) UPS? Seems like it is not doing what it should, which is to keep the network up during a power outage. |
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I'm going to start a separate UPS catch-all thread at some point. That said: Depending on how long your average power outage lasts, how much load is on the UPS, how often they occur AND how often you want to replace UPS batteries you should adopt one of the following strategies: Timed works best for known loads and brief to intermediate outages. You have an idea of how much run time at a given load your UPS will deliver so you set timed shutdown conservatively. Percentage Remaining is the proper choice for variable loads and random length outages. I use a mix of these, depending on what's connected to them. In my main office I have servers, laptops, desktops, routers, switches and IP KVMs. Router, ISP modems, core switch are on their own UPS. This is smart and its monitoring port is connected to a management PC. Other UPSes supply pods of equipment: Typically a couple of PCs and one piece of support gear. Each PC that can support a connection to its UPS has one and runs NUT. I calculate available runtime at typical load and set NUT to begin shutdown of all connected systems at 50% of this value. Those UPSes that only support one monitor connection but have multiple systems connected have a NUT Master that sends shutdown signals to the others. This is also set up as a timed function. Network gear UPS is spec'd to run 50% longer than the others. Its function is to enable connectivity to all systems in the network up to and during their shutdown times. It is set up to begin shutdown at 40% remaining battery. I have a lot of Ubiquiti stuff in my network but AFAIK none supports power monitoring and commanded shutdown via networkagent. What I may do here is set up their Console connections to the management PC which will shut them down before powering itself off. Will look into the UDM and the new UPS to see what can be configured. I'd looked at those to back up my network gear but went a different route. |
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Did a bit of digging here. The Ubiquiti UPS runs as a NUT Master and can shut down UDMs plus other connected equipment gracefully. You might look into NUT clients on each of your connected PCs. Use the mix I recommended above: Timer to bring down the PCs via NUT commands and Percentage Remaining to shut down the UDM plus any other network gear you are powering via the UPS. It goes without saying that you don't connect monitors or printers to these. You definitely want Safe Shutdown enabled and configured. Ubiquiti states that manual restart of the UPS itself may be required if it too goes into Shutdown mode. |
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Originally Posted By AnalogKid: Did a bit of digging here. The Ubiquiti UPS runs as a NUT Master and can shut down UDMs plus other connected equipment gracefully. You might look into NUT clients on each of your connected PCs. Use the mix I recommended above: Timer to bring down the PCs via NUT commands and Percentage Remaining to shut down the UDM plus any other network gear you are powering via the UPS. It goes without saying that you don't connect monitors or printers to these. You definitely want Safe Shutdown enabled and configured. Ubiquiti states that manual restart of the UPS itself may be required if it too goes into Shutdown mode. |
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Build your own with LiFePo batteries and Victron charger/inverters. Use it to feed multiple receptacles. Or buy a nice LiFeO2 power bank from EcoFlow or Anker or any of the others. Many now have UPS mode or have the speed to be a UPS. I find current UPS offerings to be severely lacking for homeowners these days. And enterprise. AGM batteries are fudd a riffic. My APC models at work are expensive and the batteries suck. |
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Originally Posted By networkguru: Build your own with LiFePo batteries and Victron charger/inverters. Use it to feed multiple receptacles. Or buy a nice LiFeO2 power bank from EcoFlow or Anker or any of the others. Many now have UPS mode or have the speed to be a UPS. I find current UPS offerings to be severely lacking for homeowners these days. And enterprise. AGM batteries are fudd a riffic. My APC models at work are expensive and the batteries suck. Absolutely this. The batteries inside normal non-lithium UPS's are not meant to be drained down all the way. Take them down past 50% just a couple of times and you've caused degradation. I have an APC SMX-3000 that I use for my network and security system, and while it's pretty high end, it still uses these shitty SLA cells. I am planning on adding a 3000 watt lithium system upstream of this in the very near future. |
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Originally Posted By networkguru: Build your own with LiFePo batteries and Victron charger/inverters. Use it to feed multiple receptacles. Or buy a nice LiFeO2 power bank from EcoFlow or Anker or any of the others. Many now have UPS mode or have the speed to be a UPS. I find current UPS offerings to be severely lacking for homeowners these days. And enterprise. AGM batteries are fudd a riffic. My APC models at work are expensive and the batteries suck. Do the Victron controllers allow for monitoring/management from either a connected PC or from the network? Support under UPS management software? If not, data or disk corruption is possible when power from the batteries is exhausted and the system comes down uncontrollably. FWIW, a number of hams I know (with myself included) have successfully adopted the roll-your-own approach where backup power is concerned. Computer systems tend to be a bit more finicky than a radio transceiver, however. Depending on the network equipment in use, it too may not be designed to handle abrupt shutdowns well. |
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Had another look at the Unifi Tower. The unit looks to be in the same ballpark as the APC 500 and 750 class offerings. I have an older SmartUPS 500 running my Edgerouter, core Edgeswitch and three PoE powered APs. Total load is maybe 75w, and this would give me several hours run time. A connected PC would cut that time down significantly. OP, look into configuring your setup to shut down after no more than 5min on battery. If you want more runtime you'll have to go bigger, possibly at the expense of losing the ability to shut down your UDM via UPS signaling. Depending on what you buy, there may be workarounds. |
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Originally Posted By networkguru: Build your own with LiFePo batteries and Victron charger/inverters. Use it to feed multiple receptacles. Or buy a nice LiFeO2 power bank from EcoFlow or Anker or any of the others. Many now have UPS mode or have the speed to be a UPS. I find current UPS offerings to be severely lacking for homeowners these days. And enterprise. AGM batteries are fudd a riffic. My APC models at work are expensive and the batteries suck. Old style batteries may have far lower performance than AGMs, but they are cheap and easy to replace. While I an loathe to quote a commie: Quantity has a quality of its own. Hospitals and similar facilities are required to replace all their batteries at intervals (IIRC annually) that leave ~90% of lifecycle remaining, and you can get hospital surplus lightly used standard APC UPS batteries from cheap (I pay ~$10 each from a local electronics supply). Its not as theoretically output efficient or elegant as AGM or lithium, but it is $ efficient for what UPS are supposed to do - cover brief outages and smooth shutdowns when restored or backup power does not come online in short order. |
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| Unifi UPSs have NUT (network UPS tools) installed. NUT is used to safely shut down connected devices. You might want to look at that. |
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Originally Posted By farfromhome: Unifi UPSs have NUT (network UPS tools) installed. NUT is used to safely shut down connected devices. You might want to look at that. Victron UPS converters are supposed to have as well but from what I'm finding, changeover from mains to battery power is too slow for computer systems. Thus, you in-line a true UPS with one if you plan on building your own. |