I’m looking to buy ups as I have few power outage (last between 1 to 5 seconds max) where I live but I have never used one so don’t know what specs should I check for
Ideally I will plug my 3d printer (about 100-160w when printing), a pi 4 with nvme drive (no idea of wattage) and a mini pc with n100 processor (around 10-20W)
Thanks for your advices
Whatever would support the combined max wattage of the devices you will connect to it. Ideally something that can handle 50-100% more power. You can control some UPSes via USB or network, so you can hook it up to that mini pc or Pi (why are they separate?) and run NUT on it. You could technically pause a print/shut down a computer/Pi if an outage is more than x seconds to reduce power usage and get through one that you otherwise couldn’t.
“why are they separated”, not sure what you meant, mini pc is acting as a server for a few usage and pi is dedicated to klipper.
Yeah, that explains stuff. I thought you might have had some stuff on Pi that you could’ve been running on the PC. In that case I’d recommend that you run the NUT on RPi, and set it to pause print on a power failure, possibly change CPU scaling (i.e. to “powersave” CPU governor if you’re running Linux) on the mini PC, or even possibly shut it down in an event when the power outage lasts longer than a minute.
Actually I could even run Klipper on mini pc but would need a very long usb to reach printer and thought it wasn’t ideal. As for the mini pc, I’m running proxmox but I’m far from being an expert so not sure if I can manage CPU scaling.
I am too, and it is really easy to do so. Look up “Linux cpu governor”. NUT (which is the most common UPS management software for Linux) can execute commands, start timers at different events from UPS.
even though i think that the psu of the 3d printer might get you over the switching time offline usv’s have, i’d go with an online usv (voltage & freqency independent)
one missed step and your print might be gone.depending on your outages you might go for a smaller battery, because you’ll have to replace them more often with an online usv.
First time I heard of online usv (also English isn’t my main language), will have to check this out
mine neither.
that’s why i wrote usv, it’s the german equivalent.i meant online ups.
The biggest issue is battery size: If the heatbed cools down the print fails. The heating is the part that takes the most power so the battery has to be large enough to support the entire remaining print duration or power outage.
Shouldn’t be an issue, power outage here are mostly about one second (5 at max) and even if my printer is being halted, my glass bed stick so much that my print don’t pop off by themselves, I always use a scraper even when completely cool down.
I can’t help much on the power draw side of this question, but one thing to look out for with a UPS is some sort of communication option. (Usually NUT over ethernet, but there are some USB options too.) Most modern UPS brands will have a plugin you can install on your Raspberry Pi and Mini PC that allows your UPS to signal, “Hey, I’ve got 3% of battery life, you actually need to gracefully shut down now.” It’s mostly useful for NAS applications with spinning drives, but it could help save your Pi’s SD card potentially.
It’s a pretty standard feature these days, but the cheapest of the cheap will omit it.
I have nvme setup on my pi 4 (I know it’s overkill for that purpose but already had pi setup like this prior to klipper), that being said I will definitely look at getting one with communication control even if power never goes down for more than a couple of seconds
You might actually want to consider a DJI Power 500 or 1000. They’re actually portable power banks but can supposedly work in UPS mode, and will run for WAY longer than a traditional lead-acid battery UPS. See also Ecoflow’s options.
