Can someone help me understand why my UPS does not work?

All I want is for it to go to graceful shutdown if there is a power outage. I am running parity check when the below screen shot is taken. I feel like I should have enough juice to make it through a power blip, but i don't.

Example - just today we had thunderstorms. I did not lose power, but the lights dimmed once and came back immediately. But the server had an unclean shutdown. This happens every time, the UPS doesn't seem to do anything. My expectation would be that it can run the server for 5 seconds if needed, and if it goes much longer, to do a graceful shut down.

Can anyone look at my setup and let me know if I need to do anything different?

As you have it configured, the UPS won't initiate a shutdown until the battery is down to 10%. This is not a good choice, as lead acid batteries don't like to be discharged this deeply, and potentially will damage the battery.

You have Time on battery before shutdown (seconds) set to 0. This disables this function.

The purpose of the UPS is not to keep the server running indefinitely. It is meant to supply power for the server to be shut down cleanly - to stop running services, stop the array and shut off the server. I know in my area if the power goes out and isn't restored in 5 minutes, it isn't coming back soon. I set my UPS to 360 seconds, as I have the battery capacity to do so (1350VA).

That's what I want...I want it to run for a minute. So I need to change the parameters you have shown to be 60? I don't want it to run indefinitely, but I know it's have it configured wrong.

You said not to have it set to 10%...what should I set it to.

I have updated to these settings now...

I want it to shut down within 1-2 minutes of being on battery.

You should actually leave the fields blank that you don't intend to use. You ideally want to use "Time On Battery" only and have unraid shut down after X amount of time when on battery. Leaving everything else blank

Just now, MowMdown said:

You should actually leave the fields blank that you don't intend to use. You ideally want to use "Time On Battery" only and have unraid shut down after X amount of time when on battery. Leaving everything else blank

Got it! Thank you!!

There really isn't any one answer when it comes to UPS. It is much more nuanced, as a number of factors come in to play, and they tend to interact with each other.

Model and size of the UPS

Total power draw connected to the UPS

Age/condition of the battery

Frequency/length of power delivery to your home

Time it takes for server shutdown

You also need to consider that UPS batteries don't discharge in a linear manner. Many will lose almost 10% when kicking in for a short power sag (ie. your lights flicker/dim for a brief moment). It is also possible you have multiple power outages, such as the power goes out for only a moment, but this happens several times before the UPS recovers to 100%. Each time the line power is restored it rests the countdown to shutdown timer.

If you are shutting down almost immediately when the UPS kicks in (such as 60 seconds to initiate shutdown), you can ignore the Battery Level and Runtime Left settings. But you can use these to shut down the server when you get repeated short outages, such that happen during a storm. I have my setting as I'll show below. I don't wish to see my battery level drop below 50%. That is my second catch if somehow multiple outages get past my 6 minute setting for Time On Battery. I have Runtime Left set to 12 minutes as a final safety net, though I hope that never is reached.