I’m running a rather small homelab and am hunting for a good UPS to help keep everything running smoothly. My top priorities are:

  • Just enough battery life to keep things running until they can be shut down
  • Compatible with open source software for monitoring and automated shutdown

Would I have better luck getting a used one and a new battery, or a brand new unit altogether? Anyone have one they don’t need anymore, on that note? 👀

Thanks for the advice!

  • IsoKieroEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    or multimeter

    Unless you really know what you’re doing DO NOT measure current on a wall outlet with a multimeter. Specially not with a cheap one. That can pretty easily break your hardware, burn your house down and kill you, not necessarily in that order.

      • IsoKieroEnglish
        41·
        3 days ago

        That’s better, but you still need to have single wire to loop it around, which is not normally accessible. And at least in here the term ‘multimeter’ spesifically means one without a clamp, so you’d need to wire the multimeter in series with the load and that can be very dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.

        Also, cheap ones often are not properly insulated nor rated for wall power (regardless of your voltage), so, again, if you don’t know what you are doing DO NOT measure current from a wall outlet with a multimeter.

          • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
            3·
            3 days ago

            Parallel won’t show current load of a device. Even a clamp type can be thought of as serial, it’s just picking up the EM field instead of actually carrying the current load across the device.

            Something in parallel will be powered by the same source, with it’s current load independent of the other device.

            (And yes, I had to think about it for a second, it’s not always immediately intuitive for me either.)

            • bane_killgrind@slrpnk.netEnglish
              2·
              3 days ago

              Pfff current I was brain-dead, yes.

              There’s smart plugs that measure current, I have some Emporia plugs at home.