som23 0 Posted October 3, 2015 Hello, I just installed a new home security camera system and I'm trying to figure out what kind of UPS to buy for the system. Does it have to be an "audio/video" type UPS or will a regular type UPS work fine? Does it have to be a "Pure Sine Wave" PSU and how do I determine what size of one I need, for example: 500va/300watts or 1000va/800watts? This is one I found on Amazon: Night Owl Security BB-86AH Battery Backup System, does anyone know anything about this particular PSU? My system is a SANNCE 8CH 960H DVR 8x 900TVL 42LEDs w/IR Cut 110ft Superior Night Vision Outdoor Video Surveillance CCTV Camera System with a Western Digital 2TB Hard Drive. There are a total of three plug-in "transformers." Two of them are 12V2A DC and the third one is DC 12V/500ma, not sure if this factors in determining how big a PSU I should buy?! Any help with these questions is greatly appreciated, thanks. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Javik 0 Posted October 26, 2015 All UPS are pretty generic now. Most electronic devices do not care about stepped sine, they convert it back to DC inside anyway. Where that really matters is driving actual AC induction motors that need a nice smooth sinewave. A generic DVR likely does not have a UPS serial input or any other way for the UPS to tell the DVR to safely shutdown and turn off. So in this case you can pick pretty much any UPS. If the DVR has serial to the UPS for on-battery / low-battery alerts, then you want a compatible signalling from the UPS to the DVR. Pick your UPS based on how long you'd like to run on battery and still have everything working. The bigger UPS gives you a longer runtime with the power out and the system keeps on recording. If you don't need to see what's happening during an outage, don't plug a monitor into the UPS. You'll squeeze some more battery life out of it. Most lead acid batteries are crap for battery backup purposes. You should replace the battery every 3 years regardless of its exterior condition. For really small UPS, probably 2 years is max life because the small battery dies more quickly. Lead-acid battery capacity slowly and silently declines, even if fully charged all the time in a UPS. Unless you do a runtime test every six months, you won't know this is happening until that critical moment you need it and whoops it doesn't work, dropped the load, crash. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Samir 0 Posted November 9, 2015 Some good advice, but I wouldn't go with anything too cheap as that stepped sine wave can cause issues of the life of the system. Our businesses come with APC BackUPS models that are sine-wave. They're not he cheapest, but there's got to be a reason why they chose them for $40k management systems. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
