"Taking the renowned Amazon customer service into account, it seems like an amazing deal for that kind of output." Amazon CS is not to be renowned but rather to be loathed. I was shipped the wrong product once and they had me ship it back but would not ship me the correct product. I decided to order the original item only to have them charge me the original price instead of getting the discounted price I originally ordered it at and get a shipping fee for what was free shipping. Another time, I purchased some headphones advertises as having noise canceling. The headphones did not have any noise canceling at all, but rather passive noise suppression, and I reported the product. It's still being advertised as having noise canceling -- years later.
And that's only 2 of many horror stories I've faced at the hands of AM CS. Please don't praise them.
I've only had exceptionally good experience with Amazon CS, so I agree with the praise. The only thing they might improve upon is having actual technical support, instead of going straight to sending it back for replacement or refund.
I agree, I only continue to shop with them for their exceptional CS. I think I've only ever had one thing where it didn't work out the way I thought it should, and it was shipping related. Their shipping since the start of the pandemic has definitely slower, but they've turned things around more recently. I still don't trust that I will get anything in two to three days.
Totally agree Amazon CS is garbage just like this UPS. Why isn't the first sentence of this review "Run as fast as you can away from this UPS"? The article talks about how the square wave produced by this UPS will kill a power supply.
I'm curious which country people are located in that have had bad customer service from Amazon. I've done a lot of purchases from them (3 separate simultaneous jobs plus being a full time caregiver where Amazon ended up being cheaper than the local health authority to get supplies). My annual order page is usually in the 60-80 pages of items per year.
After all of that I can count on one hand the number of times I've had bad experiences with amazon customer service. And reaching out the next day usually solves that. Honestly the only issue I have is then not vetting the authenticity of the product once there been several returns / one star reviews. Such as @ballsystemlord's headphones. To be fair though it's usually partially the customer's fault in believing they can get a $200 product everywhere else for $29.99 from some "ships from X" amazon seller.
Still laugh at the guy who was upset that the $30 men's belt wasn't the same as the hand made Italian one his grandfather has that would have cost $30 back in the 1920s.
Now the shipping companies ... intelcom or purolator here in Canada is the closest thing you can get to a pure vacuum (they suck that hard).
During the COVID wave Amazon was promising that lucky people in some urban zipcodes would get prime deliveries in one day but what I noticed in my rural area was that Prime was slipping and frequently missing the two-day promise.
In the last few years I've seen competitive retailers like Best Buy, Office Depot, Adorama, etc. deliver packages in one day to my location. Lately Amazon looks like a laggard instead of a leader but who cares, if you've subscribed to Prime for 10 years you might have such an Amazon habit that you won't even try another retailer.
The real strength Amazon still has is the depth of the catalog. Best Buy for instance sells some PC building supplies, they'll sell you a 2.5 inch SSD but they won't sell the bracket to install it in a desktop PC. Best Buy has some pretty chauvinistic attitudes about what they want to sell in general that holds them back.
There is something wrong in this unit - with a battery pack of 24v at 9AH the runtime should be much longer - with a 900watt load at 100% efficiency the runtime would be over 14 minutes and even at 50% efficiency should exceed 7 minutes. I suspect that one of the battery cells is defective. (24 volts 9Ah equates to 777,600 joules)
If possible please repeat the test with a fresh pair of batteries. (Also check for something overheating.)
Even on idle it draws 40-50 watts. So add that on top of 100 watts draw, and the efficiency of the unit while inverting the current, and you'll see that the batteries are fresh and working properly. It's just a terrible unit.
Lead-Acid battery ratings are usually 20 hour rates. if your load takes less than 20 hours to deplete the battery, you also get less capacity out. A guy called Peukert made an empirical formula, and the phenomenon has been named the Peukert effect.
Using a conservative Peukert exponent, runtime with 100% efficient conversion at 900W works out to around 23 seconds with 24V 9Ah battery. Not too far off from actual tested.
I didn't read the whole article but what! 40-50 watts just be idling? That's insane.
I'm sure people will blame it on China because it's made in China even though it's designed in the US. But wait... iPhone is also made in China and designed in the US but I don't see anyone's given any credit to China, not that iPhone has anything spectacular. Western zombies are really rotten to the core.
Ok a product is made in China by some Chinese company but somehow has Amazon brand on it. Yeah yeah blame One Hung Low or whoever for this junk but you can't deny the fact is that it has American brand on it, which means they at least have control over this product's design. FYI there's a few components in iPhones are made by Chinese OEMs. But hey let's blame someone else if the product sucks and take all credits if the product is well made. Typical scums.
These things usually have no separate powersupply to power their own electronics and the battery charger. At its heart there would be a 1500VA autotransformer. The minimum would be that there's 0V, 24V, and 230V taps. Sometimes they add more taps so they can boost voltage up or buck it down to handle brown outs without going to battery. Hard to tell from pictures, but looks like this unit might not have these "line-interactive" features.
The same transformer used to push out 900W from a 24V battery is run in reverse to provide 24V from mains for battery charging. Using that large transformer for a tiny load is stupendously inefficient, but it's cheap. The article mentions a 12V linear regulator on oversized heatsink. They're probably regulating the 24V down to 12V, and then further down for the microprocessor. That regulator is going to waste 50% input Power as heat, so the heatsink better be big. At least the fan seems to be 12V, i wonder if the relay coils are also 12V?
I wonder if they could have made it cheaper still by skipping the intermediate 12V supply and used unregulated 24V to feed a 24V fan instead. As a bonus you would be able to tell from fan RPM if battery is close to fully charged. As the article author mentions, the fan is oddly high quality, and I'm surprised they added a big chunk of aluminium to get enough heatsink to power this fancy fan.
This doesn't seem to be available on Amazon in the US. I tried a couple different search strings but couldn't find anything. The only Amazon basics UPS was the oversized surge suppressor style and lower power. The review was interesting. I'm not at all opposed to these types of "store brand" items when they provide a good value. As the article mentioned some of them seem to be rebranded versions of very good productions but that doesn't appear to be the case here. I find the amount of leakage even when off surprising and baseline power consumption when running off AC but otherwise doing nothing unfortunate. If this was available in the US I'd probably pass on it as it just doesn't seem up to par even if a very good price.
I'm not sure the leakage is really there. With a sensitive enough instrument you'll pick up voltage anywhere, and oscilloscopes are typically very sensitive. If you're familiar with 50/60Hz speaker hum that increases or decreases as you touch the headphone plug, it's basically the same thing.
For an electrician, the leakage in terms of mA would be more interesting.
LOL the stellar CS mentioned, welp they disabled my account from posting anything because 1 of my reviews looked suspicious so said I had to be a bot. And there's apparently no course of action I can take to get my account status back, so sorry, too bad. Meanwhile most products have more obviously fake reviews than I could count.
Step 1: find a product segment you want to take control of Step 2: secure labor for next to nothing in a non-free market Step 3: flood the market with your own product at or below cost Step 4: watch competition unable to compete with limitless monetary leverage Step 5: don't forget to contribute to political campaigns to ensure this process can repeat again Step 6: praise free market economics, never admit you depend on and exploit non-free markets Step 7: again, never admit you depend on and exploit non-free markets
I've wasted so much money on lead-acid batteries for UPS units over the years, and they're basically always failing when I've actually needed it. I don't understand why at least smaller consumer units of this rating and price range haven't switched to a better battery technology.
There are lithium UPS, they are expensive and the cells are not user replaceable for safety reasons. There are much tighter thermal limitations too 0-40C is operating. Read a user manual for one and marvel at the safety warnings.
You mention several times that the price is low, and the entire review is based around that premise, but nowhere in the article is the price actually stated. This makes it impossible to put this review in context since we don’t know how much it costs in relation to an APC.
Ya I noticed the same thing! The price wasn't in the first table, strange. At Costco I can get the 1350VA Cyberpower unit for $100 and you have Costco to return it to when it fails. This product seems like a terrible deal in comparison.
Huh, that's worse than a deal APC one I got 6 years ago, which the battery still works without issues and is replaceable. Then again, the APC one does self-maintenance on the battery, including exercising it, so I don't know.
Then like others pointed, that idle usage is insane, hell no, that was not acceptable 6 years ago, much less now, that sounds about right for Amazon.
Did the person who wrote the headline read the article? The article describes a hunk o' junk that might destroy your PC, I'd hardly call that "passable".
I have yet to see a switching UPS that actually works. I've spent thousands of dollars on APC, Cyberpower, Tripp Lite -- none of them work. My neighborhood has a ton of momentary outages due to trees. They last about half a second to a second. Every single time, the UPS failed to activate. Then I had the opportunity to have one desktop running through a UPS (APC brand) and another virtually identical one plugged straight into the wall when a momentary outage came by. The one plugged into the wall stayed up. The one plugged into the UPS died like a dog. The UPS actually made it worse. Until the day I can afford a double conversion UPS, I'm not going to be suckered into buying another one of these.
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ballsystemlord - Tuesday, July 5, 2022 - link
"Taking the renowned Amazon customer service into account, it seems like an amazing deal for that kind of output."Amazon CS is not to be renowned but rather to be loathed.
I was shipped the wrong product once and they had me ship it back but would not ship me the correct product. I decided to order the original item only to have them charge me the original price instead of getting the discounted price I originally ordered it at and get a shipping fee for what was free shipping.
Another time, I purchased some headphones advertises as having noise canceling. The headphones did not have any noise canceling at all, but rather passive noise suppression, and I reported the product. It's still being advertised as having noise canceling -- years later.
And that's only 2 of many horror stories I've faced at the hands of AM CS. Please don't praise them.
Thanks.
ZoZo - Tuesday, July 5, 2022 - link
I've only had exceptionally good experience with Amazon CS, so I agree with the praise. The only thing they might improve upon is having actual technical support, instead of going straight to sending it back for replacement or refund.Einy0 - Tuesday, July 5, 2022 - link
I agree, I only continue to shop with them for their exceptional CS. I think I've only ever had one thing where it didn't work out the way I thought it should, and it was shipping related. Their shipping since the start of the pandemic has definitely slower, but they've turned things around more recently. I still don't trust that I will get anything in two to three days.Threska - Tuesday, July 5, 2022 - link
That's been gone for a long time unless you pay a LOT for shipping. Most stuff is about a week and the sit on it till they feel like shipping.29a - Thursday, July 7, 2022 - link
Totally agree Amazon CS is garbage just like this UPS. Why isn't the first sentence of this review "Run as fast as you can away from this UPS"? The article talks about how the square wave produced by this UPS will kill a power supply.Ithaqua - Thursday, July 7, 2022 - link
I'm curious which country people are located in that have had bad customer service from Amazon. I've done a lot of purchases from them (3 separate simultaneous jobs plus being a full time caregiver where Amazon ended up being cheaper than the local health authority to get supplies). My annual order page is usually in the 60-80 pages of items per year.After all of that I can count on one hand the number of times I've had bad experiences with amazon customer service. And reaching out the next day usually solves that. Honestly the only issue I have is then not vetting the authenticity of the product once there been several returns / one star reviews. Such as @ballsystemlord's headphones. To be fair though it's usually partially the customer's fault in believing they can get a $200 product everywhere else for $29.99 from some "ships from X" amazon seller.
Still laugh at the guy who was upset that the $30 men's belt wasn't the same as the hand made Italian one his grandfather has that would have cost $30 back in the 1920s.
Now the shipping companies ... intelcom or purolator here in Canada is the closest thing you can get to a pure vacuum (they suck that hard).
PaulHoule - Monday, July 11, 2022 - link
During the COVID wave Amazon was promising that lucky people in some urban zipcodes would get prime deliveries in one day but what I noticed in my rural area was that Prime was slipping and frequently missing the two-day promise.In the last few years I've seen competitive retailers like Best Buy, Office Depot, Adorama, etc. deliver packages in one day to my location. Lately Amazon looks like a laggard instead of a leader but who cares, if you've subscribed to Prime for 10 years you might have such an Amazon habit that you won't even try another retailer.
The real strength Amazon still has is the depth of the catalog. Best Buy for instance sells some PC building supplies, they'll sell you a 2.5 inch SSD but they won't sell the bracket to install it in a desktop PC. Best Buy has some pretty chauvinistic attitudes about what they want to sell in general that holds them back.
Marthisdil - Monday, August 29, 2022 - link
And I've had nothing but good experiences with Amazon CS. Been a member of theirs since they only sold books back in the early 2000sNo problems getting refunds/replacements for things, etc.
As such, I'll continue to praise them
Duncan Macdonald - Tuesday, July 5, 2022 - link
There is something wrong in this unit - with a battery pack of 24v at 9AH the runtime should be much longer - with a 900watt load at 100% efficiency the runtime would be over 14 minutes and even at 50% efficiency should exceed 7 minutes. I suspect that one of the battery cells is defective.(24 volts 9Ah equates to 777,600 joules)
If possible please repeat the test with a fresh pair of batteries. (Also check for something overheating.)
kristoferen - Tuesday, July 5, 2022 - link
Would this affect the sine wave?andychow - Tuesday, July 5, 2022 - link
Even on idle it draws 40-50 watts. So add that on top of 100 watts draw, and the efficiency of the unit while inverting the current, and you'll see that the batteries are fresh and working properly.It's just a terrible unit.
shadowjk - Sunday, July 10, 2022 - link
Lead-Acid battery ratings are usually 20 hour rates. if your load takes less than 20 hours to deplete the battery, you also get less capacity out.A guy called Peukert made an empirical formula, and the phenomenon has been named the Peukert effect.
Using a conservative Peukert exponent, runtime with 100% efficient conversion at 900W works out to around 23 seconds with 24V 9Ah battery. Not too far off from actual tested.
nicolaim - Tuesday, July 5, 2022 - link
It should be illegal for a product with 40-50 Watt idle power use to be sold!Einy0 - Tuesday, July 5, 2022 - link
Yeah, that is insane. It seems like 5-10 times more idle draw than I would expect.sonny73n - Thursday, July 7, 2022 - link
I didn't read the whole article but what! 40-50 watts just be idling? That's insane.I'm sure people will blame it on China because it's made in China even though it's designed in the US. But wait... iPhone is also made in China and designed in the US but I don't see anyone's given any credit to China, not that iPhone has anything spectacular. Western zombies are really rotten to the core.
29a - Thursday, July 7, 2022 - link
Designed in the US, WTF are you talking about? It's a Chinese OEM unit made by Lian Zheng.sonny73n - Friday, July 8, 2022 - link
Ok a product is made in China by some Chinese company but somehow has Amazon brand on it. Yeah yeah blame One Hung Low or whoever for this junk but you can't deny the fact is that it has American brand on it, which means they at least have control over this product's design.FYI there's a few components in iPhones are made by Chinese OEMs. But hey let's blame someone else if the product sucks and take all credits if the product is well made. Typical scums.
philehidiot - Friday, July 8, 2022 - link
You really want to find a way to be upset about that, don't you?shadowjk - Sunday, July 10, 2022 - link
These things usually have no separate powersupply to power their own electronics and the battery charger. At its heart there would be a 1500VA autotransformer. The minimum would be that there's 0V, 24V, and 230V taps. Sometimes they add more taps so they can boost voltage up or buck it down to handle brown outs without going to battery. Hard to tell from pictures, but looks like this unit might not have these "line-interactive" features.The same transformer used to push out 900W from a 24V battery is run in reverse to provide 24V from mains for battery charging. Using that large transformer for a tiny load is stupendously inefficient, but it's cheap. The article mentions a 12V linear regulator on oversized heatsink. They're probably regulating the 24V down to 12V, and then further down for the microprocessor. That regulator is going to waste 50% input Power as heat, so the heatsink better be big. At least the fan seems to be 12V, i wonder if the relay coils are also 12V?
I wonder if they could have made it cheaper still by skipping the intermediate 12V supply and used unregulated 24V to feed a 24V fan instead. As a bonus you would be able to tell from fan RPM if battery is close to fully charged. As the article author mentions, the fan is oddly high quality, and I'm surprised they added a big chunk of aluminium to get enough heatsink to power this fancy fan.
Mikewind Dale - Tuesday, July 5, 2022 - link
So I'll stick with my Cyberpower CP1500PFCLCD with a true sin wave. But thanks for this review. It's good to know what's out there Keep them coming!Threska - Tuesday, July 5, 2022 - link
Great housewarming gift.https://www.reddit.com/r/iiiiiiitttttttttttt/comme...
erotomania - Tuesday, July 5, 2022 - link
I'm sticking with my Cyberpowers too. Or what's left of them. Failing faster than fruitflies. Won't be tempted again. 20 or so UPSs later.kristoferen - Tuesday, July 5, 2022 - link
When will we get reviews of a UPS worth buying? :)RadiclDreamer - Wednesday, July 6, 2022 - link
APC or Liebert if you want quality. There are other units that are decent but those two are the best made.catavalon21 - Friday, July 8, 2022 - link
Right after we get reviews of current GPUs.kpb321 - Tuesday, July 5, 2022 - link
This doesn't seem to be available on Amazon in the US. I tried a couple different search strings but couldn't find anything. The only Amazon basics UPS was the oversized surge suppressor style and lower power. The review was interesting. I'm not at all opposed to these types of "store brand" items when they provide a good value. As the article mentioned some of them seem to be rebranded versions of very good productions but that doesn't appear to be the case here. I find the amount of leakage even when off surprising and baseline power consumption when running off AC but otherwise doing nothing unfortunate. If this was available in the US I'd probably pass on it as it just doesn't seem up to par even if a very good price.shadowjk - Sunday, July 10, 2022 - link
I'm not sure the leakage is really there. With a sensitive enough instrument you'll pick up voltage anywhere, and oscilloscopes are typically very sensitive. If you're familiar with 50/60Hz speaker hum that increases or decreases as you touch the headphone plug, it's basically the same thing.For an electrician, the leakage in terms of mA would be more interesting.
QueBert - Tuesday, July 5, 2022 - link
LOL the stellar CS mentioned, welp they disabled my account from posting anything because 1 of my reviews looked suspicious so said I had to be a bot. And there's apparently no course of action I can take to get my account status back, so sorry, too bad. Meanwhile most products have more obviously fake reviews than I could count.dicobalt - Wednesday, July 6, 2022 - link
Step 1: find a product segment you want to take control ofStep 2: secure labor for next to nothing in a non-free market
Step 3: flood the market with your own product at or below cost
Step 4: watch competition unable to compete with limitless monetary leverage
Step 5: don't forget to contribute to political campaigns to ensure this process can repeat again
Step 6: praise free market economics, never admit you depend on and exploit non-free markets
Step 7: again, never admit you depend on and exploit non-free markets
shabby - Wednesday, July 6, 2022 - link
Step 1: find a hot selling product in your own store from a 3rd party sellerdenny89 - Wednesday, July 6, 2022 - link
Looks exactly like my Powerwalker VI2200 LCD UPS, inside and outside. I wonder if it works with WinPower or mine works with their monitoring software.Scipio Africanus - Wednesday, July 6, 2022 - link
The big transformer is probably an autoformer for voltage regulation. That makes this a line interactive UPS.domboy - Wednesday, July 6, 2022 - link
I've wasted so much money on lead-acid batteries for UPS units over the years, and they're basically always failing when I've actually needed it. I don't understand why at least smaller consumer units of this rating and price range haven't switched to a better battery technology.dicobalt - Wednesday, July 6, 2022 - link
There are lithium UPS, they are expensive and the cells are not user replaceable for safety reasons. There are much tighter thermal limitations too 0-40C is operating. Read a user manual for one and marvel at the safety warnings.shadowjk - Sunday, July 10, 2022 - link
Plus the Li-Ion battery will most likely have the same 3-6 year life span as the Lead-Acid battery.Guspaz - Thursday, July 7, 2022 - link
You mention several times that the price is low, and the entire review is based around that premise, but nowhere in the article is the price actually stated. This makes it impossible to put this review in context since we don’t know how much it costs in relation to an APC.webdoctors - Thursday, July 7, 2022 - link
Ya I noticed the same thing! The price wasn't in the first table, strange. At Costco I can get the 1350VA Cyberpower unit for $100 and you have Costco to return it to when it fails. This product seems like a terrible deal in comparison.tamalero - Friday, July 8, 2022 - link
That looks like an identical clone from the UPS 1500VA from TRIP LITEEven the same battery retention system.
m16 - Saturday, July 9, 2022 - link
Huh, that's worse than a deal APC one I got 6 years ago, which the battery still works without issues and is replaceable.Then again, the APC one does self-maintenance on the battery, including exercising it, so I don't know.
Then like others pointed, that idle usage is insane, hell no, that was not acceptable 6 years ago, much less now, that sounds about right for Amazon.
PaulHoule - Monday, July 11, 2022 - link
Did the person who wrote the headline read the article? The article describes a hunk o' junk that might destroy your PC, I'd hardly call that "passable".pjcamp - Tuesday, July 12, 2022 - link
I have yet to see a switching UPS that actually works. I've spent thousands of dollars on APC, Cyberpower, Tripp Lite -- none of them work. My neighborhood has a ton of momentary outages due to trees. They last about half a second to a second. Every single time, the UPS failed to activate. Then I had the opportunity to have one desktop running through a UPS (APC brand) and another virtually identical one plugged straight into the wall when a momentary outage came by. The one plugged into the wall stayed up. The one plugged into the UPS died like a dog. The UPS actually made it worse. Until the day I can afford a double conversion UPS, I'm not going to be suckered into buying another one of these.