PlanNet’s Michael Fluegeman, PE will be presenting at the first annual Critical Facilities Summit being held at the Charlotte Convention Center in North Carolina from October 21-23, 2013. The Critical Facilities Summit is designed for seasoned professionals responsible for the design, construction and management of mission critical facilities and data center operations.
Michael will be presenting Keeping UPS systems “uninterruptible”: operating, maintaining and replacing UPS systems.
Session Overview
UPS systems are intended to provide continuous power to IT equipment and other critical electronics, providing backup for brief power outages and bridging the short-term gaps between utility failures and generator starts. But once a significant investment has been made in UPS equipment, proper care and significant effort is required to achieve desired results. In this session, attendees will gain a deeper understanding of UPS operation, monitoring, maintenance and eventual replacement, including items affecting initial cost and operating cost over the lifetime of the equipment. Fundamentals of major UPS technologies will be explained along with integrating maintenance bypass, generators, PDUs, local and remote monitoring capabilities, batteries and alternatives including flywheels. Newer UPS features including high efficiency operating modes and load testing without load banks will be covered, and initial commissioning best-practices as well as ongoing maintenance management will be presented.
Learning objectives of the session include:
- Understanding and managing UPS reliable, usable capacity; understand the kVA-kW pitfall;
- Understanding and managing UPS status and alarm indicators, local and remote: Major (take action now), minor (take action later) and those to be ignored;
- Evaluating when it’s time to replace increasing numbers of rack-mount UPS units with centralized UPS systems; and
- Evaluating the pros and cons of sticking with UPS factory-direct service vs. changing to 3rd–party service organizations.
