Originally Posted By: OVERK1LL
My SmartUPS runs a self-test every month. They will also tell you when one of the two batteries (SUA1000) is dying.
I would pose the question as to why a company who's sole focus is power protection (APC) would continue to use a technology that is "antique" unless they felt there was merit in doing so....
Belkin makes everything under the sun; they do not focus on power products, and they are (compared to APC) a relatively new player to the game.
The last time I checked, Belkin doesn't make anything comparable to APC's InfrastruXure series products, or even an enterprise-grade UPS, so while their product may be more "efficient", it doesn't necessarily make it better.
I guess I am just looking at this from the other side; why ISN'T APC using the same style step-up transformer as Belkin? Perhaps that is a question I will ask APC the next time I'm talking to them.
Points well taken. My gripe with APC (even though I have them in the house also) just like many large corporates they, just like Symantecs, have lost focus on their fundamentals ever since they become bigger and bigger in the US corporate IT world: they expand on a lot of things but still stick to the old, rather inefficient technologies and would transfer their manufacturing facilites to places with lower labour costs such as India (my XP 1kVA is made in India) instead of investing more $$ on R&D.
You may say that Belkin is like jack-of-all-trades, the truth is, there are many ways to improve in an already matured square-wave interter design and keeping the frequency low and using an iron-lam step up transformer is just one of the old style technologies that's been with us since the 30s, inefficient and not-cheap (cheap is only relative if you are to look into the relative conversion efficiency of a ferrite core stepup trans from a higher freq switching perspectives).
I've been servicing all small to medium scale inverters and have torn apart many of them over the years: Belkin isn't badly built at all and their component quality is at par with APC India-made ones or even better. Only sad fact is that Belkin doesn't wanna venture into a large/enterprise scale power solutions picture for some other reasons too...
And for my take, I would go with Tripplite instead of APC (yes, my day-time job company is using APC InfraStruXure as well, but I hate it...for the price we paid so far...
Q.
