Anyone know if any utilities exist that work with UPS backup batteries? Unraid parity dislikes just about everything but it really hates being shut down abruptly. Most of these Cyberpower backups have a USB cable that connects to the PC they are connected to. Which will then tell the PC to gracefully shut down during a power outage. Any such support exist in unraid apps?

Unraid supports apcupsd (look in Settings) natively as well as a NUT UPS plugin.

 

I am using a Cyberpower UPS with unraid via USB connection.

 

Model = CP1500EPFCLCDa

 

It is working with "Network UPS Tools (NUT) for UNRAID" under community apps plugin.

 

These are the settings to communicate with the UPS in the plugin.

 

 

 

awesome thank you I will try  that out

 

What feature are you getting with the NUT plugin that you are not getting with the standard functionality?

Edited April 14, 20242 yr by xokia

I think there was another plugin that was depreciated, so I changed to the NUT plugin.

1 hour ago, kiwijunglist said:

I think there was another plugin that was depreciated, so I changed to the NUT plugin.

I see......I enabled the default feature ConnerVT mentioned it seems to work fine. I was trying to figure out what the NUT plugin ads to the default feature. From the screen shot you provided I cant tell what extra you get with the plugin.

 

 

Edited April 14, 20242 yr by xokia

It all looks very similar.

 

I think your dashboard screenshot looks a little bit nicer.

 

 

 

 

@kiwijunglist You may need a new battery.  5 minutes of run time reported is awful low for 100% battery on a 900W UPS:

 

@xokia I haven't used NUT.  I believe the main benefit is that it allows multiple devices to run NUT (one as server, others as clients) so you can power down these devices as well if running on UPS power during an outage.  apcupsd may have this functionality as well, but I haven't investigated this as I currently don't have a use case for it.

 

You may wish to reduce your run time before initiating shutdown.  A UPS should not be run down to less than 50% battery capacity.  It is very hard on the battery, reducing battery life.  It also takes significantly longer to charge a battery than discharge - 10 minutes of run time could take hours to return to 100%. 

 

Power outages also aren't consistant.  Power could go out, come back, then go out again.  The "clock" restarts when power comes back on, but now you may be starting at 90% instead of 100% (even after just a minute).

 

You also need to take in consideration that it takes Unraid a bit of time to do a clean shut down (the goal for a UPS protected system).  Unraid spins up all drives, stops all running Dockers and VM, completes any cached writes in RAM, spins down the array, shuts down any remaining processes, then powers down.  This may take several minutes, depending on what you have running on your server.  It is wise to run a shut down (maybe a few times) and time how long it takes.  Use this information to decide how long the server should run before initiating a shut down.

 

Here are my settings.  I let the server run on UPS for 6 minutes (Time on Battery).  If the battery level falls below 50% or the UPS says it has less than 12 minutes of runtime left I shut it down (this handles power on/off/on/off situations):

Edited April 14, 20242 yr by ConnerVT
Added more info

Thanks, you are right.  It should be ~40 minutes run time at ~100W load.

 

My server and unifi gear is usually idle at 36W so I guess usually it's 15 minute idle time on battery.

 

The battery is 5 years old, it runs 24/7, it would be extremely rare for it to be on battery power.  Eg. if I cut the power to do some electrical work for a little while then it would go on battery.  The cupboard does get fairly warm though usually around 25-30C in there, maybe up to 35C in extreme hot days.

Edited April 14, 20242 yr by kiwijunglist

14 hours ago, ConnerVT said:

@xokia I haven't used NUT.  I believe the main benefit is that it allows multiple devices to run NUT (one as server, others as clients) so you can power down these devices as well if running on UPS power during an outage.  apcupsd may have this functionality as well, but I haven't investigated this as I currently don't have a use case for it.

 

You may wish to reduce your run time before initiating shutdown.  A UPS should not be run down to less than 50% battery capacity.  It is very hard on the battery, reducing battery life.  It also takes significantly longer to charge a battery than discharge - 10 minutes of run time could take hours to return to 100%. 

 

I tried finding windows version of NUT but looks to be unix only. I do have one machine on Windows. Can find an ancient version but nothing recent.

Edited April 15, 20242 yr by xokia

On 4/14/2024 at 8:50 AM, ConnerVT said:

apcupsd may have this functionality as well,

It does, I use it extensively, each of my VM's runs apcupsd in slave mode, and is set to begin shutting down a minute or two after the host server reports a loss of power. Server shutdown is much smoother for me if the VM's are all shut down before the server itself starts the shutdown sequence.