Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

If you have any aquaponics experience with a UPS please chime in.

I'm going get one for my indoor setup. I'm just debating if it should be for air pumps only or also for a pump on a timer.

I'm off grid so it may seem a little silly (redundant) but this way I can shut off all the power in the house when I'm out (or maybe sleeping at night) & the fish will at least have air.

Nov-Jan are the low power months and look - I'm right in the middle of 'em.

Got mine on a 2nd hand one with some additional battery packs attached.
The only issue I had was my piston air pump causes it to chuck a fit and shut down the outlet. Added a 60w pump and it ran but kept going into alarm intermittently.
Already had one 3 hour test.

How many watts was it rated for & how many were you using? Any idea how long it would've ran before running out?

I have one on an reef tank aquarium. It works fine for the water jet, but not for florecent lights. The only time I tried to run lights on it, the bulbs burned out. I have no idea why. It is a smaller 360 watt UPS (APC Back-UPS NS 600) and I only get about 10-15 minutes of water movement out of it before it chokes.

What's it running that it chokes on?

I just bought one a little smaller:
APC Back-UPS® ES 550VA 8-Outlet Power-Saving UPS
330W/550VA output capacity
8 outlets (4 battery backup, 4 surge)
Typical backup runtime: 13 min. (half load), 3 min. (full load)

I've got just the air pump hooked up to the backup - only 4 watts so it should last for several hours at least. If I had to run the pump after several hours I could plug it in and run it to cycle the water a bit in an emergency.

Only downside based on reading the manual is that it starts beeping when regular power goes off. This could be annoying at 4am. Hopefully my husband is going to rewire our house batteries this weekend...

Is it old? Some equipment (laser printers) do not like to run on modified sine wave inverters. Some of our florescent light flicker quite a bit when we turn them on.

There is no air pump on the tank. It depends on the water jet to pump water up from the sump and water movement through the bio balls for air. There is also a protien skimmer that draws a few watts also. I'm not sure how many watts the water jet uses, but the point I was trying to make is a UPS will work, but needs to be sized for your requirements. 15 minutes is ok for short term for me, but extended power outage requires a generator. The beeping is annoying, and gets worse as power drains... In it's final minutes it beeps more frequant and I swear louder!!! For the price and protection, I think the small ups's are good buy. The other thought would be where you locate it. Mine is inside. I could probably put one in the garage for the outside system, but temps and humidity might kill it pretty quick.

Hi all
I have noticed supercheap autos and autopro are selling Jumpstart batterypacks that can be used for running your DC equipment when out camping- ie tv, radio,lights
I was wondering if something like this would be suitable as a backup system?

UPS are usually too small reserve time, really only designed for giving enough time to power down PC - minutes not hours. For something little might be OK.
You can hot wire in some extra batteries but risk the charge side of the UPS as many arent regulated and will burn out or stuff battery.
Second hand ones mostly have buggered batteries.

Power packs from SCA will provide power but no better than a normal SLA battery, pretty dear for thier capacity, and you need to switch the thing and inverter on when power fails

There are 240 v switches which can turn on 12v supply when 240v fails, either run inverter to second pump or look at 12 v model

Mine is 1050w rated. With 3 external battery banks attached it was reporting a 12hour backup time with a 85w load.

Ups has 4 x 7.2Ah, each bank 8 x 7.2Ah. So total of about 200Ah.

My experience with UPS is IT related with my most recent experience not being a good one. Regular testing of backup power systems was performed where the mains power is 'cut' and a generator started. In this situation the UPS provides power for the few mins the power is cut and the generator gets up to operating temp etc.

Only thing the UPS failed and the entire environment shut down.

Morale to the story: regularly test and maintain your UPS (or any backup system you employ)

Yeah, I just found that out last night. Has a techie like you figured out how to cut that wire? That would be the one good reason to cob something together.

I'll have to cob something together for the hoop house system come spring. My husband wants it to be a stand alone system. It'll have to be weather tight.

Hey DéjàVoodoo, how'd your timer hold up? That $16 one worked fine inside but the ones I used in the hoop house are hard to read because the lcd is a little screwed up. Humidity I guess.

There was a thread about this. One of those battery packs even had an air hose but the box said it wasn't for continuous use. For the AC stuff you'd have to do the math on your system.

The timer held up good until I put it on a generator one night and blew it up. The LCD still works, but internal relay or whatever does the switching no longer turns the pump on.

The next one (same model) is still ticking along. The timer is in the garage and I run an extension out to the system and so far it seems to be working out great for me. The humidity in the garage is not nearly as bad as outside though. I just saw at Walgreens they have timers for $5 each. They are not digital though - they are the older ones with the adjustable pins. I need to pick some up as spares. It would be nice to have a few on hand with different times already programmed in. Like right now I am running constant flood, but only because I do not want to reprogram the timer for longer pump times.

I am now really annoyed at this this. I was out at a cookie swap last night so no one paid attention to the power, which cut out at 2:30 am. The beeping of the UPS went on for an hour till it finally quit. Only 1 hour??? It was only powering a 4w air pump!

The beeping also starts up when the generator is on & putting in less than full power (as the batteries start to get fully charged).

If I can find a way to muffle the beeping I will. If not, I'll ask Dennis to open up the UPS and cut the wire that makes the beep.