Ups Technology

Hi,

Here is an excerpt from a website that describes the two types of UPS you're interested in. The full link to the site is....

http://www.monitor.ca/monitor/issues/vol9iss5/feature3.html

(remove spaces from the above URL)

...and here is the extract...

"Intermediate Power Protection ? will protect against basic power disturbances as well as a few other problems such as under-voltage and over-voltage. Typically, this type of power protection is known as 'line-interactive'. It features regulator circuitry and a bridge between the utility power and the battery to compensate for power-related disturbances. This type of UPS is usually sufficient for small- to medium-sized offices where a variety of office equipment and small- tomedium-sized networks are in use.

Advanced Power Protection ? should provide protection from all power-related disturbances. The equipment is isolated from the utility power and receives power that has been 'cleaned' by the UPS through the use ofinverters and rectifiers. This 'online' technology is required for very sensitive electronic equipment and for applications where any amount of downtime brings significant cost. Typically, medium- to large-sized offices and industrial facilities require this type of protection to achieve a zero-downtime standard."

Cheers,
Tim.

The article referred in the answer 1 is good; it gives you a very detailed idea of UPSs systems and why you should need them.
But it has an ERROR in the Offline definition: both systems, Online and Offline CAN communicate with a computer for status monitoring and/or operation control; it depends on the characteristics of the model selected. Almost all UPSs, Online and Offline, in the market do it!
About the operation without batteries in the Online UPSs, it will depend on the model. There are many UPSs in our market that will support the disconnection of the battery bank (this is usually referred as Hot-Swap Batteries), but there is other model that don't. In any case, the only advantage of that is the possibility of battery replacementwithout having to turn off the system. Remember that without batteries, the UPS is just a Power Conditioner.
If you have an Online UPS that not support Hot-Swap of the Battery Bank, you should consider the implementation of a Static Transfer Switchto take the UPS off for battery replacement (this is good even for UPS maintenance, and in big systems is really necessary, even if the UPS has an Internal Maintenance Bypass Switch).
If your system is so critical that you can't take the risk of putting the UPS offline even for maintenance you should consider redundant configurations to be 100% of the time protected.

Regards,

Jose P. Mir
jpm@jpmir.net

Expanding on what Jose offered concerning critical systems....

Many higher end servers have two separate power supplies. If you have a separate UPS and a separate source of power for each of the two power supplies, you will have prety good degreeof protection -- barring a major blackout. Certainly you will have enough protection to be able to gracefully down the server -- or if you are in a transaction processing environment -- to switch to a remotely located server/data center.

humbly submitted
diabetic

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