OT:UPS batteries

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Dave Liquorice escribió:

APC UPSes can talk in dumb or smart mode over the serial port. Which you get depends on the model.

I think all support dumb mode, but only some support smart. Yuo're using smart. They start up in dumb mode and you send the letter Y to switch on smart mode.

Dumb mode uses signals on certain pins of the RS232 port to indicate things like power failure, etc.

There's a partial list of smart commands here:

also see

There's no handshaking, so you need to (as you say) issue commands one at a time with a spacing (delay) between each. Of course, you need three wires (transmit, receive and ground) on the serial connection if you want to get telemetry or information out of the UPS.

[Bob Eager]

Those are the smart commands, but the link I posted shows some of the lower lavel programming (unfortunately the term 'program' is used for both)

[Andrew Mawson]

Talking Smart APC UPS's anyone know how to dump the 'Data Log' log file from an APC Smart UPS to a file on disk ? This is the one that records line voltage, but only for a couple of weeks. We are experiencing very high overnight voltages as measured by two UPS's that I have - both showing that in the early hours figures as high as 262 volts !!! We have two power inputs, one to my barn comes as first drop off the 415v three phase transformer fed by an 11kV line in our vegetable plot. The other to the house is 'one pole down the line'. Whenever I've cross checked the reported voltages during day time the UPS figure and my trusty Avo 8 agree.

I've UK Power Networks coming out this evening to monitor the situation, and to get the UPS data for them as hard copy I had to photograph the screen !!!!

Andrew

Andrew

[Andy Burns]

I was doing it on an SU2200

[Nick]

In message , Andrew Mawson writes

Haven't looked at this sort of thing for a few years, but would enabling syslog and pointing it at a Windows box running Kiwi syslog server (or the Linux equivalent) do the job?

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Andrew Mawson escribió:

Use the Powerchute software from APC. It's a free download.

[Huge]

And worth every penny that you paid for it.

[Andrew Mawson]

I'm using Powerchute ! It let's you SEE the data, but I cannot find a away to DOWNLOAAD it :(

Andrew

[Andrew Mawson]

Yes it is a bit rubbish - keeps losing communications on it's USB port - seems endemic as all three of my APC ups's do it :(

Andrew

[Huge]

I could never get it to run, so gave up. I don't use Windows any more, anyway.

[Bob Eager]

I tried it when I got my first UPS, and I thought the software was crap.

All the UPS units are now monitored using nut.

[Dave Liquorice]

Are you sure the data is stored in the UPS to download and not by Powerchute somewhere in the system it is running on?

[Andy Burns]

I think if the UPS is connected by RS-232 then there's no data stored in the UPS, it's what's been collected and stored on the PC by PowerChute ... if it has an ethernet management card fitted then the data /is/ stored on the management card, and can be accessed from a web browser.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Huge escribió:

Troo. But it does allow you to log and graph incoming mains voltage. Which is about all it's good for.

It was also the only Windows machine we had at the remote site, an ancient laptop installed just to run Powerchute :)

Re. other comments, never tried it with USB UPSes but it worked reliably over serial.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Andrew Mawson escribió:

It does have logging options, and exports in CSV. I don't have it running here, so can't tell you any more than that, sorry.

Is it Powerchute Plus? Maybe you're running an older version.

[Andrew Mawson]

Well I've looked through Powerchute's file structure and not found anything that I could use, using the file modified date as a clue to what was active.

Andrew

[Tim Streater]

It seems to be built in to OS X these days (just as well as APC stopped updating the Mac version).

[Dave Liquorice]

Trouble this is windows the data could be anywhere, it could be under /Program Files, it could be under /Appdata in an (one of the) Administrator account9s), it might be scattered across the /Appdata directories of any user that logs in. If you are using a recent version of Windows and Powerchute is "old" then the data might be hidden away in a virtualisation area, per user that fires up Powerchute

Alternatively the UPS doen't hold a log, I don't think mine does. An APC Smart-UPS 700 inet manufactured 11/03/98 (it says).