Monitoring and Maintenance

Your job doesn't end with deploying your power conditioning equipment. In fact, in order for the equipment to be effective, you need to maintain it properly. For that, several factors hold importance. For instance, a significant factor is the running cost, which can be quite high for large UPS systems. They need to be kept cool, as higher temperatures can actually reduce battery life. So, proper temperature maintenance is a must here, which means you need to factor in your electricity bills for the air-conditioning. Next comes the cost of batteries themselves. Remember the average life of SMF batteries used by most UPSs is three years. Even a small 30 to 40 kVA UPS could use a battery bank with an equal number of batteries. So if each battery costs Rs 10,000, then just the cost of replacing these batteries runs into

lacs. 

Lastly is the cost of support and AMC for your UPS, which depends upon how much uptime you want from the UPS. Cost will vary based on how many nines you'd like in the availability. For instance, you have to factor in some downtime for maintenance of your UPS every year, for battery as well as system inspection. Can you afford to have this downtime? Else you'll have to take other measures of keeping your systems up and running even without it. Besides a UPS, there are other associated equipment like power distribution units, power conditioners and gensets that also need routine maintenance. 

Monitoring your equipment



Besides regular maintenance, you also need to employ measures for monitoring your power management equipment to act as warning systems in case a device is about to fail. Since batteries are an important part of a UPS system, ensure that the UPS you're buying can analyze the batteries' condition and their ability to handle the load. If a battery develops a fault, then the system should be able to send an alarm to the concerned person before it fails. So, check out the monitoring and reporting capability of a UPS and ensure it's been set up correctly.

You can get SNMP enabled s/w to monitor power conditioning equipments

Management comes next. Many large UPS systems have extensive management capabilities, which are controlled through software. For instance, the software can provide information like the percentage of load connected, input/output voltage, backup time remaining, etc. Nowadays, there's also hardware available for remote management of UPS systems. So you can check the status of your UPS over the Internet. You can also safely shutdown your systems in case of a power cut. The UPS will inform you via e-mail in case of a power failure or some other problem. 

Support for SNMP is another key aspect for UPSs, as this allows your UPS to be recognized by your network management software. This facility will allow the NMS to monitor the UPS remotely and also download all logs and alerts being generated by a UPS.