Frequently asked questions.

An Uninterruptible Power Supply sits between the power source (for example a wall outlet) and your equipment, preventing undesirable behaviour of the supply — outages, sags, surges, bad harmonics — from affecting how that equipment performs.

A UPS has internal batteries that keep power flowing to equipment even when the source stops. It typically provides minutes rather than hours, but that is usually enough to ride out glitches and short outages — and where an outage is longer, it gives you time for an orderly shutdown. The result: jobs do not stop, users are not disrupted, equipment avoids the stress of a hard power cycle, and data is not lost because a machine went down without flushing cached data.

It absorbs small power surges, smooths out noisy supply, continues to provide power during line sags, and carries the load for a period after a blackout. With management software, it can also shut equipment down automatically during long outages, monitor and log supply status, display voltage and current draw, restart equipment after an outage, raise alarms on fault conditions, and provide short-circuit protection.

Both provide backup supply. The difference is changeover speed: a UPS switches from mains to battery immediately, while an inverter takes noticeably longer — long enough that sensitive equipment will drop.

An electrical device that is not key to keeping the business running and will not be damaged by a power cut. In short, it does not matter if it loses power during an outage — so it does not need to be on the protected bus, and leaving it off keeps the UPS smaller and cheaper.

There are three. A standby (offline) UPS is the simplest and cheapest: the battery and inverter sit idle until the mains fails, then a transfer switch changes over. A line-interactive UPS replaces the separate charger, inverter and switch with a combined inverter/converter that is always connected to the output — it responds faster and also filters noise and regulates voltage, typically up to around 3,000 VA. An online (double-conversion) UPS reverses the sources: the load runs continuously from the inverter, with mains as the secondary path. There is no transfer time at all, and the double-conversion process completely isolates output power from input power.

For servers, medical equipment, industrial control and anything that cannot tolerate a transfer gap, specify online double-conversion. For desktops, routers and POS terminals, line-interactive is usually the sensible balance of protection and cost. Standby units are rarely the right answer for business equipment.

That depends on the size of the UPS and what it is protecting. A typical computer workstation might be specified for around 15 minutes of runtime. If a machine genuinely needs to survive for hours, the right answer is a broader solution that includes a generator — the UPS then covers the gap until the generator picks up. Note that a UPS consumes power running its own inverter even at very light load.

Back-up times range from two minutes to many hours. The question to settle first is what you actually want to do during a long outage. If the answer is 'shut the servers down cleanly and wait', you only need enough runtime to complete that shutdown. If the answer is 'keep trading', you need a generator and the UPS covers changeover. We size to the answer, not to a guess.

Small to medium UPS batteries generally have a 4–5 year design life, varying with the number and depth of discharges and with environmental conditions, particularly temperature. Larger UPS systems generally use batteries with an 8–10 year design life. Batteries should be checked, tested and discharge-tested periodically to confirm they still perform.

Yes. You can monitor directly from the UPS to a computer over RS232 or USB, which is standard on most modern units. To monitor across a network you add an SNMP/network card — the UPS can then be viewed in a browser or through management software, and email or SMS alerts can be sent automatically when the UPS changes status.

Preventative maintenance prevents failure and extends a UPS system's service life through ongoing support and fast emergency response, improving the MTBF (mean time between failures) of the installation. In practice most UPS failures are battery failures, and batteries degrade predictably — which means they are preventable with scheduled testing.

Yes, and at no charge. Actolog can survey your site to establish exactly what your power protection needs are. We look at the existing facility, measure the real load, and make a recommendation that suits it — rather than quoting a model and hoping it fits.

Nationwide across Nigeria, from offices in Lagos (Gbagada) and Abuja (Utako). Faults can be registered online and our technical team responds directly.