Caveat: I am not a power engineer Background:
We have a set of Balance 20X and BR1 (classic, mini LTEA) units deployed at a community in the mountains.
Lately, at some of the houses the BR1 units have not powered completely up - the lights are all green, but they do not connect to the cellular networks and do not allow Wi-Fi access.
Power is supplied by PG&E, and is suspected to be somewhat flakey.
The same units work well when plugged into another house, the latter being powered by solar + PG&E mediated through Tesla power systems.
The Balance 20X units seem to be doing just fine when plugged into the sockets where the BR1s fail (but there has been limited testing of that). Tentative diagnosis:
The PG&E lines (or the local circuitry in the houses) provide marginal power (by some unknown-to-me quality metric). Question:
Basically - what to do (without rewiring the houses or replacing all the BR1s with 20X units)?
Would adding a UPS between the wall power and the BR1 be likely to condition the line sufficiently? If so, recommendations? If not, other recommendations?
(As I noted, line power is not where my competency is).
The deployment is a few hundred miles from where I am now, so experimentation is a bit tricky.
You may open ticket and attention it to me. At least I can help to check whether any abnormal logs from the BR1 Mini. No idea at the moment. But look like related to the power issue.
I’m betting you are on the right track there. It was good of @TK_Liew to suggest he take a look. We’ve run into similar issues a couple of times. These routers do not like V sags and can get quite flaky which such an event occurs.
If TK concurs this is the issue I’d have two suggestions: (1) use a small UPS and set it’s “trigger” V as high as possible. Even a small UPS may be a bit of over-kill but would make sense if there is anything else that has to be powered, e.g., a switch. (2) There are a number of 12V “battery back-up” units available via such common sources as Amazon. You’d probably use the Peplink OEM wall wart to power the battery pack and the battery pack to power the router. Some of them furnish their own power supply and if so I’d probably use that.
Thanks, I may take you up on the offer once I get the unit back online. Next time I head that-a-way I’ll bring a UPS to see if that improves the state of affairs.
If you’re going to use a UPS to try and work around the possibly flakey power make sure it is a proper online one, not a line-interactive model i.e. something that actually does power conditioning and smoothing / regulation.
Hi @zegor_mjol. I’ll leave a specific product recommendation to @WillJones but I’ll tell you how we go about testing such things – for whatever interest it may be. :<)
We would place the BR1 “wall wart” on the output of a Variac. We would meter the Variac’s output and the output of the wall wart power supply simultaneously with accurate instruments. We’d reduce the Variac’s output from “high line V” slowly and watch the DC power supply’s output while doing so. When we see the DC V drop to a level that is minimally acceptable (according to Peplink’s specs in this case) we’d make a note of the AC V of the Variac’s output. That’d be the minimum line V that would be acceptable. (Incidentally, we’d place a typical load on the wall wart os we are not looking at unloaded output V – that can be misleading as some wall warts have very poor regulation. We’d use a “Y” cable between wall wart and load/meter to make the measurement.)
The next step would be to select a UPS with an adjustable low line V setting. The product must be capable of reverting to battery when the line V reaches the level previously identified – or lower.
First thing I would do is get a decent multimeter and measure volts and frequency since those are the things that could be off. Low voltage would be most likely issue, bad frequency would be strange from a power company that’s usually a generator thing. An $80 Kaiweets will get you true RMS voltage and frequency and ac and dc clamp meter to even measure amps.
Pepwave power supplies seem pretty forgiving and the wall wart is just going use a transformer to drop the voltage then rectify to DC, and Pepwave have a pretty wide range of power input usually and the frequency wouldn’t even matter that much.
If bad power is actually the problem yes a online UPS could help but is a waste, its a battery charger with a an inverter, instead you could just get a 12v battery and a small charger with enough amps to run the pepwave then run right off the battery rather than inverting the battery then stepping down and rectifying again with a UPS and wall wart.
Thing is if the power is bad enough it won’t drive the pepwave directly I would be surprised if it could drive an Online UPS or battery charger correctly too. Many battery chargers can take pretty bad power, like down to 90v (in the US) and not exact 60hz and still function, but the pepwave itself should be similar with its dc power supply.
$dayjob we use pretty much only Eaton, if you want an online one you need the 9 series.
At home I just picked up a Riello Sentinel Dual to see what they are like, so far seems reasonable and you get a lot more for your money vs Eaton and APC especially when looking for true online UPSs.
Both Rick and jharrell make good points too.
Advantage a monitored UPS gives you potentially is some logging over time (all ours have mgmt. cards in them we poke at with SNMP to get stats out of) which might be useful if it is in an intermittent issue that you then have some data to take correlate with other activities at the property (does this only occur when X is in use etc.) and also some data to take to the power company - not sure how it is in the US but certainly in the UK we have limits on what is acceptable in terms of delivery when it comes to line voltage, frequency etc.
Hi, we use the 12v Telecom UPS units to power BR1s as backup communication paths for alarm systems. These are typically used for providing backup power for VOIP type phones being sold with home Internet. Much more efficient than using a standard UPS that needs to boost 12v battery power to 120v then plugging in a power adapter to reduce back down to 12v. Without that conversion you get many hours of battery backup with a small 12v UPS that uses a single 12v 7AH battery.
here’s the model we use but there are other options if you search. These have been difficult to get sometimes due to supply chain issues but have been getting ours through Graybar electrical distributer.
If an AVR UPS fixes the issue then its just a voltage issue, probably low voltage, which honestly is surprising since Pepwave 's have such a wide input voltage tolerance (10v-30v on the Balance 20X) so then incoming AC power before wall wart would need to probably be below 100v to cause an issue, maybe there is some crazy EMI coming in and the units EMI filters are helping out.
The Cyberpower unit is line-interactive so its not isolating from the incoming power like an online UPS would do. Its just running through a EMI filter and possibly a transformer if it detects low or high voltage to do AVR.
What does the unit say for incoming voltage and does it have the AVR icon lit? According to the manual it should be showing AVR if that is active and can display both input and output voltage on the screen.
Best filtering by far is just running the Pepwave off a 12v battery that is charged by a 120v charger and you get a very efficient and stable UPS should the power go out, that basically what those telecom UPS are.
I had a similar issue where my voltage was very low during heat waves in California we dipped to 104V and I have a 20x on a simple UPS and it got in a super strange state, lights were on and everything looked fine but I could not connect remotely. I was out of town so told my wife to just unplug/replug. Thankfully this resulted in everything coming back online. I sold her that peplink would never let the internet go down again :(… so no I am planning to go 12v route, or get an AVR UPS.
My current one is super dumb no AVR, but would love confirmation if AVR would have even helped me in this situation. Or should I just invest in 12V batter and runs all my switches off that…
The AVR UPS seems to have done the trick for my community member.
One question I have w.r.t. the 12V battery/charger v. the UPS route: The UPS does not use its battery for (most) AVR purposes, and thus (battery) longevity is enhanced v. the 12V where my understanding is that the battery is the conduit and thus always on-line. Does that significantly reduce the usable longevity of the latter?
Good to know that the batteries for the 12V approach have some longevity in them.
In our community in the mountains there are some very funding-constrained folks, where counting the value of a $60 purchase is an important exercise to them. Good to learn that it is likely quite competitive w.r.t. recurring costs.
WIth the battery route so long as you get the float voltage correct the battery will last a very long time, this is what any UPS does, keeps the battery floating ready to go. Only difference is the Pepwave will be a constant small draw for which the charger will need to put out more amps to hold float voltage compared to no load which just needs enough amps to counter battery self discharge. The batteries are not cycling if the charger is maintaining float.
This is how most RV’s and off grid systems work, lights and electronic run off the 12v system supported by batteries with a charger of some sort keeping the batteries up when outside power is available. Works very well because batteries buffer any power fluctuations and the charger cleans up incoming power and if power goes off there is no transfer time, the batteries just take over.
We have a couple thousand 12v UPS systems in the field and would say battery life is at least three years. Typically they come with a high quality 12v 7AH amp/hour battery and are relatively cheap to replace at $15 or so (may be more now with supply chain issues) and same type of battery used in most traditional alarm and fire panels for battery backup.