Do those pumps actually consume that much power or is that the 'rating' marked on them? A 110 watt pump is well over 1/10 HP, that would surely cause a tidal wave in anything except a huge fish tank.
The pump in question moves water at 6500 lph, its used to return water from a sump tank back to the main display tank..
.. Tony
In message , Richard Porter writes
So you could stand there and watch them die ?
Hamsters, wheels ... you can see where I'm going
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In message , Tony writes
As others have said about minimum temperature, how long does your tank take to reach this minimum temperature, a couple of hours?
Tropical fish can survive quite a lowering of temperature as long as the dT/dt is slow. You could always get a 12v kettle (Halfords / CPC etc) and connect it directly to a car battery with a thermostat to cut off the heat source when an acceptable temperature was reached.
Other things to think of are such things as a cover to reduce heat loss from the top and e.g polystyrene to insulate the sides to reduce heat loss from the sides of the tank
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Hi,
Also consider the reliability of the UPS itself, what happens if there is a fault with it's electronics, does it fail over to the mains or warn in some way? Maybe have 2 UPS set up so the second takes over if/when the first dies, using a relay. Also test them at regular intervals.
When siting the batteries bear in mind they have a shorter service life at high temperatures and don't work so well at low temperatures.
cheers, Pete.
In that instance, you absolutely need to maintain a high flow rate to avoid death of the bacteria.
.andy
To email, substitute .nospam with .gl
Well don't buy an APC then !
In article , Tony writes
It'll be cheap for a reason, probably knackered batteries.
just fitted a 5000VA UPS to a rack. It weighed 100kg with the batteries installed.
No, just size the cable appropriately. Also consider warning labels en route and at the socket to indicate that the cable will remain live in the event of mains power being switched off at the consumer unit.
100 kilo in a loft?
Strictly speaking, no. Some have a connector for external battery packs to be attached. Some people have had luck connecting car batteries to UPSes to increase the run time, but as you can imagine, it doesn't look pretty. I'd also be concerned about whether the charging circuit in the UPS could properly charge the larger battery.
The better ones will test themselves every now and then, by deliberately putting the output on battery and running it's tests. All you then need to do is connect it to a PC (Serial or USB cable) and run their monitoring software.
Gordon
I'm not an expert on pumps (in fact quite the opposite!) but I'm sure someone more knowledgeable around here could give a ball park figure for the sort of power consumption you'd expect for the above pump.
That's something like 1500 gallons per hour that you're moving.
Several points here...
The first one is that with 265w load you'll need around a 300va UPS. You dont need more VA unless you plan to add more loads later, perhaps another tank etc. (Although... see the charging issue.)
Secondly you'll need to replace the battery with something miles bigger. A car battery is well suited to UPS work because although they dont like repeated deep discharge, on a UPS deep discharge will only occur very occasionally.
The UPS charger will charge the big battery, but will take proportionally longer. If for example you go from 10 mins capacity to
8 hours, thats a battery of 42x the capacity. If say the original charge cycle took 2 hours, your new charge time will be 84 hours.If you can get the loads to go into a safe working mode when the puter shuts down, then you could not UPS the puter, which will give you a much smaller load to run. Safe mode would be oxygen pump on, heater at perhaps half power, and so on.
Finally not all loads will run on a modified square wave invertor, or will run but overheat. Some things need sine wave: best to find out what youve got and what it needs before buying the wrong thing. Computers will run quite happily on square waves.
Of course this does all add another reliability issue: that of faults in the UPS itself. Given the probably high value of your setup, it might be wise to add some kind of simple warning that lets you know if mains to the equipment fails, so that. No UPS lasts forever.
NT
In message , N. Thornton writes
Not the case at all. The cheap'n'cheerful UPS are not designed to run continuously at/near full rated power. After all the installed battery capacity is only 5-10 minutes at full load, so that's all the inverter electronics are designed to copy with. Fit a big external battery and the UPS will probably overheat and shutdown. If you want extended run time by adding batteries, you need a much bigger UPS so its only running 25%-50% of rated load.
In message , Andy Dingley writes
Seconded. American bastards.
Not to mention start up surges that motors require. Without something in the order of 2 to 3 times their running power available they might not start at all. These surges may also kill (as in damage) or just shutdown a small UPS.
If you have a motor big enough to have any sort of noticeable "startup surge", then your problem will be how it reacts to the harmonics in the UPS output. Surges will be the least of your worries.
good point.
NT
£100 petrol gennies from Argos. I'm sure they had this sort of capacity and certainly wouldn't be upset by lengthy running nor produce a square wave.
Rob
Rob
lack of self start ability unreliable
How about using a number of 12v - 240v inverters. Since these can now be picked up from about £20 - £25 each (marko's latest offer) and I belive that they produce a near sine wave o/p at about 300va. So you could split the loads accross a couple of these units. Then get a number of car battries and a suitable battery carger.
The big question is will the cheep inverters cope with 24/7 opperation?
Peter D
cheap invertors will be MSW not sine. But thats fine for at least some of the loads.
NT
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