Possible OT: power monitoring

[Tom Buskey]

Sorry for top posting.

I have an apc 1300xs that has the same info a kill-a-watt has.
Apcupsd will output that info on the command line.  You'd have to poll
+ parse, but that gets it into the computer for less then $100.

I've used apc powerchute in the past to get info also.  There was a
daemon that could log the voltage, amps, and temp sensors.  I have
scripts somewhere that will gnuplot it.



On 6/16/08, Curtis Sandoval <curtis.sandoval at gmail.com> wrote:
> All,
>
>   I have my key systems at home on three UPS battery backups, two TrippLite
> 900s and a CyberPower 675, all with USB ports for notifying the protected
> systems of a power failure.  I have two questions related to this:
>
>   Is there a way, using these or other UPS units, to constantly monitor
> input line voltage and length of outages?  I recently had three outages
> within a week and they seem to have been preceded each time by a few hours
> of low input voltage (112v-114v) but I'd like to verify that and/or possibly
> preemptively power down noncritical systems to extend the length of battery
> coverage.  Power quality monitoring would be nice, but my searches seemed to
> indicate that quality monitoring is much more expensive, and I could
> find nothing specifically saying that a UPS or quality monitor would report
> real-time to a computer (specifically SUSE 10.2 or Ubuntu 8.04).
>
>   Also, is there a way to monitor the power draw of a set of devices (say,
> plugged into the same power strip and monitor the total) or individual
> device for the purposes of capacity planning for UPS units, akin to a
> Kill-a-watt device but with some sort of ability to report its data to a
> desktop?  I have noticed a surprisingly large difference in how long two
> identical UPS units will last with seemingly similar device loads and would
> like to be able to determine how large a unit I would need to provide a
> certain amount of time of backup based on my measurements of average length
> of (and time between) outages, factoring in recharge times at a given input
> voltage.
>
>   I have been looking at getting some new or larger UPS units, and I've
> noticed there is a nonlinear relationship between price and capacity, which
> makes me wonder why a person would not buy two or more smaller units and
> daisy-chain them to get higher capacity and redundancy.
>
> Thanks.
>

-- 
Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com