5SC1500

I've had the Eaton 5SC1500 plugged in for little over a week and it's been smooth sailing ever since. Yes this unit has a higher price tag than a CyberPower UPS but the quality and post-sale support from EATON are worth the price. Also the ABM should in theory have the internal battery last ~5 years. That's longer than any APC or CyberPower unit I have read about. My equipment is pulling roughly 130w of power on average. Roughly speaking that's 11% capacity of this unit with 1 hour of battery capacity if there were an outage. Now from the beginning, this UPS weighs 34lbs so be careful lifting with your back. Make sure to open the front panel to plug in the batteries when you receive the unit. Before you plug in any equipment into the UPS outlets, plug the unit into wall power to let the internal batteries charge for at least 8 hours. The elephant in the room, the loud fan. Yes it's annoying when it's running BUT that's only if the internal battery is charging. Once the battery charge state reaches >96%, the fan shuts off. I have not encountered the fan running with a higher load on the UPS as of yet. There is also a buzz of electricity coming from the front panel that is inaudible from a distance but is present when close to the unit continuously. I'd say the buzz is in the ballpark of ~10-20dB. Speaking with a EATON's technical support rep, which is very quick to respond on the phone, this is normal operation from the unit. Lastly, make sure to size the UPS to be appropriate for your equipment. My equipment will not use more than 30% of this UPS's rated capacity so the fan will never run unless there is an outage and the battery has to recharge. I will update my review should my experience change. Overall, I am a satisfied customer.

It was hard to find info about how the fan operates which I really wanted to know because some people complain about fan noise. In my experience the fan only turns on when recharging the battery after a power outage and when the UPS is drawing from the battery during a power outage. It has not run any other time. Regarding the noise itself, I can definitely hear it when I’m in the same room as my network equipment but to me it’s just low frequency background noise and I have bigger things to worry about when the power goes out anyway. For me the fan noise is a total non issue. GPU fans in general are much more noticeable. The other thing I couldn’t find information about was the display backlighting. I had hoped that I could set to always be on but I wasn’t able to. I like to periodically glance at it to see power usage, it gives me idea if various equipment is properly going into standby etc. But no, you have to push a button to see the display. You even have to push a button to see minutes remaining during a power outage. That’s a little obnoxious. At least keep it on during an outage. I have high hopes for this one. I got tired of various consumer level APC/cyberpower/etc failing with circuit board problems after a few years. This Eaton runs significantly cooler under normal operation so hopefully it does its job for a long time.

Before I couldn't sleep knowing my systems were unprotected. Now I can't sleep because of the constant fan noise. Despite that it works fantastically. I got it because it has excellent support for Network UPS Tools. That takes a bit of setting up but there are guides, and if that's too much Eaton provides their own monitoring software as well. I just wish the rackmount version was cheaper, but this will work fine. Just needed some good earplugs. Future reversions should use a temperature sensor and a duty cycle on the fan. I've heard of people replacing it with a quieter one but I'm not ready to void the warranty just yet. UPDATE: I had a friend who had his die so I gave him my noisy one. I got the 5S1500LCD to replace it and it's very quiet. It works very well even though the packaging and protective Styrofoam came damaged. All my systems are up and running. Not sure why NUT shows it as an Ellipse PRO but I'm not going to complain. It can call itself whatever it wants to as long as it works as intended. UPDATE 2: He had a power outage and it told him he had 30 minutes, but it died after 5 in the middle of a shutdown. He doesn't know if his 30 year old tape drive is dead or not but he's not happy.