Su-Kam's Online IntelliQ UPS

Recently we got a chance to review a Su-Kam's IntelliQ Series of Online UPS.
This series ranges from 1KVA to 50KVA, and is aimed at providing power
conditioning for mission critical hardware in a data center, like LAN nodes,
telecommunication systems, etc. The model we received was a 5kVA, which came
with fifteen 200AH batteries. This provides more than two hours of backup time
on full load. Su-Kam is positioning this series of UPS for places where very
pure output voltage is required. The device clams to give a consistent 49.9Hz to
50Hz output frequency and zero distortion and noise in the output voltage. As a
result the device also protects your systems from disturbances and voltage
variances in mains power.

The device also comes along with a very useful software using which you can
monitor and manage it. The UPS can even be configured for sending different
types of alerts to different administrators in case of certain power situations.
For instance, if there's a power outage or over/low charging of batteries, the
admin can receive an alert as an SMS or e-mail. Not only that, the software is
also capable of showing you the status of Input/Output voltage, Input/Output
Frequency, Main Power's status, total load, battery voltage, etc right on the
dashboard of the application. This will allow you to keep an eye on the health
of your UPS from a single interface. It can even generate historical graphs and
data for your power and power usage pattern that you can monitor across the
world on Su-Kam's website.

Tests and results

Testing such a large device is not easy. As it's a 5KVA device, loading it
to 100% of its capacity was a major challenge. We connected 15 standard Intel
dual-core machines (without monitors), 6 Rack mounted Servers, two 100 watts
bulbs, 3 monitors, a couple of network and KVM switches. Even after doing all
this we were only able to load the server to 54% of its rated capacity. We then
cut off the mains and ran the entire load on the UPS's battery. The UPS happily
accepted the load and kept our load running without a hitch. Even after two and
half hours, the UPS software utility showed only 60% discharge. So one can
easily deduce that with this kind of load, the UPS can provide backup for at
least 5 hours. To test the purity of output voltage we tried changing the input
frequency and voltage. We varied the frequency from 46.0Hz to 53.5Hz and in all
cases the output frequency was 49.9Hz. This is very good. We then varied the
input voltage from 180V to 230V and again the UPS gave a steady 209V to 210V
output.

Bottomline: The product is very much
customizable and its base price (the price of the UPS without batteries) is just
54k. Of course, the recurring cost will be that of the batteries (a single
battery costs around 16k), and if you want two and half hours of backup on full
load, you'll need fifteen batteries, which amounts to around 2.4L.