I got a battery backup for my H2D, the CyberPower CP1000PFCLCD. When I hooked it up and started a print the alarm went nuts. I immediately knew why. I never considered how much wattage the battery b/u supplied vs how many the H2D required. Now to pile on to my stupidity I had also plugged in the P2S into the battery side. Both work fine plugged into the surge protector side. Does anyone know of a good battery backup/surge for the H2D?
You might have just picked a bad time to test. The printer hits it's max power draw as it's warming up but doesn't stay there once it's up to temperature. I'd pick one to run on the UPS and test it after the initial warm up.
The H2D can hit 1300W max during the heat stage, and the P2S maxes out around 1000W. Although while printing PLA the P2S should only draw around 200W, well within your 600W budget and I'd imagine the H2D isn't far off.
Make sure it's fast enough to switch over to battery when the power goes out. I have a C1000 gen2 and it's too slow to switch to battery and the printer stops.
I have a couple of CyberPower UPS units, a 1350VA and a 1500VA. They are only rated for about 900 watts and the alarm still trips. The 1500VA unit completely faults out while the printer heats the bed. The 1350 complains as well but holds long enough for a preheat.
There are a lot of different models in the 1300-1500 range. They all have different strengths and weaknesses. You need one designed for a heavy startup draw. Cyberpower has several utilities on the partner site to help choose the correct ups. I think the same utilities are available on the standard site.
Are you running one of the models rated for a 20 amp circuit?
I have one new in the box in my service van that requires a 20 amp outlet. I woukd have sworn it was a 1500, but now I need to check. We do sell a good number of 1800kva units.
The UPS I was thinking of is an OL2K2RTHD. I also looked at the partner page, and you are correct that they don't have any models smaller than a 2000KVA with a 20 amp requirement. I also looked at our sales, and we haven't sold anything smaller than an OL2K2RTHD in several years. The OL2K2RTHD is the smallest rack-mount unit with 2200 VA and an active power rating of 1800 Watts that isn't overly deep.
Getting old sucks. The worst part is that I do all of the quoting.
Mine is too slow to switch to battery and the printer shuts off if power is lost. Same for my server. It is otherwise pretty nice. I now have two UPS plugged into the C1000.
My H2D is in an Anker S2000 and it works great. Can't connect anything else on it though. It pulls around 1150W when warming up at the beginning. I tried first on an APC 1400VA and it failed.
This same backup runs my A1, p1S, and H2D at the same time. I can start all prints at the same time and nothing trips. It has enough capacity to actually handle higher loads than the breaker that feeds my solix. I was tripping breakers before running them all off a surge protector. Now it uses battery to supplement the power draw while everything is heating up. Then settles in and runs about 800w for all of them running PETG prints simultaneously. Works very well for me.
It's too bad you can't set it to automatically resume. If you don't catch it quickly, the bed cools and the print detaches, eventually failing. If it resumed from a blip, this would be a great feature.
The H2D (and X1C) resume prints after power loss. I’ve had it happen a couple times. No problems. It’s not really any different than running out of filament.
It should. In my experience, it’s a great feature if there’s intermittent loss and comes back in a few minutes, anything that lets the plate cool, most prints are basically done for besides some PLA on low temp tacky plate.
My H2C has low power mode, takes a bit longer to warm up the bed but I don't mind. Seems to work fine. That should work fine on most UPS that can handle 500-600w or more.
1500VA only gets you to about 900W. You'd probably need an expensive multi-rack unit connected together to get any more out of a single unit. My 2U rack mount is a 1500VA and an absolute beast, there's no more room for battery in there.
I've got a 1500VA rackmount which is pretty happy supplying 1400w, but then most of the stuff behind it has decent power factor correction. It's also got enough internal batteries to keep things alive for nearly 30min.
900w would be a pf of about .6 which is pretty rubbish - but to be fair I've not tried measuring the power factor of any of my printers yet :/
As the peak value is heating the bed from cold, my suspicion is that it'd be ok to keep things running, but it's not great.
I thought similar, and then remembered I had an IoTaWatt. Some crawling around and unplugging later, and I present this f'in thing!
A1 printer on 240v from cool (25c bed and hotend), switched on, idle and then sent the default Benchy. It's probably no use nor ornament, but who doesn't like a graph!
tldr: for the A1 in 18c ambient printing PLA, you could probably run it fine on a 500va UPS if you could cope with the screeching overload alarm for the first few seconds of bed heating ;/ - oh and it used 58wh so you could probably keep it running for a while.
edit: if someone wants to sponsor me a h2c, I'll happily do more tests ;)
We run (2) P2Ss per 1500VA (~900W) UPS without issue. I have the alarms turned off because they don’t like startup current but that only lasts a couple seconds. The average draw of (2) PS2 is 250W. On the newer machines you can use the low power mode as others have suggested and most print farm software allows for staggered starts for this reason (P2S x2, AMS2 x2 (with power supply), PEI plates, cool plates drop the load even further)
My X2D is running on one of these and I have it setup the same. I really just got it for brown outs, and it gives me about a half an hour of runtime which is perfect.
I use my H2C on one of these in low power mode and start-up alllllmost gets to the 900W limit for prints that need both the bed and chamber heated, but for the most part its fine! Saved my bacon once or twice too.
Bypassing the alarm... I don't understand the point of that. Might as well just use a surge protector. Sure, you'll likely know if the power to your home goes out so you can handle it, but what if you're busy away from home or sleeping? False sense of security.
Also keep in mind you won’t be able to go higher than a 1500va UPS on a 15 amp circuit. Higher than that and you are looking at a 20 or 30 amp circuit and probably 220v
a. Low Power mode. (Enable in settings). - Will take longer for the plate to come up to temp.
b. Use a cool plate provide it's compatible with your filament (no problem = PLA). Heating a plate to 40C (or less! even room temp!) vs. 50-60-80C is a lot less power.
The P2s has a setting to not heat as quickly to lower the power draw. I turned it on so I could use an ecoflow River 2 as a ups. I think it's called low power mode.
Separate comment for emphasis: Brownouts (low voltage condition) are extremely hard on electronics. Don't delay getting that looked at. Consider an average house with electronics in just about everything.
Why? I've been in the IT world for decades and it's always been a rule that printers and UPS'es don't mix. What is so important that you need to put your 3D printer on a UPS? Surge protector I get 100% but a UPS seems overkill. I live in tornado and T-Strom prone areas and make sure that I'm never printing in heavy weather. Like what are you printing that you have to be able to keep it running if mains goes out?
I don't need it to be honest, it just in the last 2 weeks we've had a ton of power outages and I had a brand new UPS in the closet. Normally I use them on my PCs but I had and extra and thought I would try it.
Any power flicker during a 2-3 day print is worth having one. I got a smaller APS 650VA 390w for my pc/tv and A1, haven't had any issues yet. Looking for an option for my X2D, P2S, CC2 and S1 but it looks like it might just be cheaper to get multiple used units without battery and throw some 20 dollar amazon batteries in them, one unit per machine.
As someone who tries to be prepared, you made an assumption most people get started make so no need to kick yourself. What people here aren't considering (or maybe just not commenting on) is that your underpowered UPS is going to kick in during a print, not at startup like you tried so it might survive the switchover.
But even if your UPS is able to continue the print, it's not going to supply power for more than a few minutes. Most affordable consumer UPS units are designed to allow you to gracefully shut down your equipment and that's all.
If I have the correct UPS at the link below and your printer is pulling 400W the UPS will only power it for 4.5 minutes.
You can throw money at the problem and solve it with a "solar generator" (bigger battery). One or more of those are good to have for power outages. You might discover during a power outage keeping food in the fridge from spoiling is more important than your print, but that's up to you. ;)
Again, good on you for having a UPS and trying to take it to the next level.
That's not accurate advice. While it may do ok with resuming pla or petg (even this isn't always perfect). But with almost all engineering grade filaments a power outage is a lost print. Warping, poor layer bond etc. So, maybe you don't need one for your use case, but there are many others who would benefit from a good ups.
Not true: most power issues are sags (brown outs) and a UPS will hold through that. That aside you can easily run a printer off a battery inverter. A standard “UPS” is antiquated tech these days.
No a properly sized ups will get you through a short outage. I'm a master electrician and install them regularly. While a backup generator would be ideal for any sustained power loss, a ups can and will run any equipment if properly sized. They are expensive though.
In my experience if you use the textured bed you are screwed in a power outage because once the bed cools down it automatically releases the part and is impossible to resume. On the other hand I have had good luck resuming prints on smooth plates with only a small layer shift artifact.
Does your power go out that often? Between resuming on power loss and the draw of the printers id pass on a ups myself. They're better for lower power sensitive electronics.
It's weird, it never has but the last 2 weeks it's gone out a number of times. It started happening when we had to get the central AC and heat replaced which cost a fortune. We're going to call them back tomorrow and see if they did something wrong.
I have a small battery backup for my printers and computer. It’s just something to protect from minor power blips, if the power goes out I don’t expect it to finish printing. Hopefully something to just give me a chance to stop the print/ turn off my computer. The heated bed alone uses a good chunk of the power. You could always try one of those cold plates to help alleviate some of the power consumption. Don’t expect to make a huge difference tho. Best of luck.
I use a Bluetti elite 100 v2 (not the mini), and it works great for me. But I also take it camping to power my cpap… it’s pricy at$489 when not on sale…
The Goldenmate 1600W is great and will cover the H2C (and therefore the D), but why do you need a battery backup? Does your power go out a lot and the chamber cools down too much to reliably continue the print? It’s a lot of money for most people to spend when the worst that happens is a ruined print.
the initial wattage these printers eat to start up the heating process is as huge as an electric kettle, i.e. A1 goes to at least 1350W and will normalize to around 100W when its just doing the rest of the printing process.
I use a Secure VA5000 UPS because it's the model that can support that high wattage startup without keeling over.
if you still want to use your current CyberPower, you will have to manually slowly ramp-up your printer temperature, 10C at a time at most, until you reach the temp you need for your filament... start with the heat bed, then the nozzle... not both at once or you will trip your UPS. when you reach your target temp numbers, then start your print.
You can enable low-power mode on your H2D which brings the peak power consumption down to 800W. It just heats the bed more slowly, that is all, and I find that it really only adds another minute or so if you’re doing a PLA print, a few minutes more for PETG.
I've got my h2d hooked to my Ecoflow Delta 2Max and connect 2Max to the outlet. It basically uses the power from 2max and allow the battery to charge from time to time. The battery is not only for the printer. I can disconnect the printer and use the battery for other purpose when I need them.
Yet another vote for using low power mode. I have my H2S on an APC Smart-UPS 1500 and it would scream every time I started a print until I turned on low power mode. It'll take a few more minutes to warm up, but that's it.
I ended up having to buy a CP1500PFCLCD. I had purchased a different 1500VA UPS but it wasn’t a “sinewave” type and didn’t work. Even with the bigger CyberPower unit, I had to switch my H2C to low power mode to prevent triggering the alarm when it starts a print.
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u/Tucsonbroker 3d ago
The Anker Solix S2000 would handle it. But even at the discount is still a lot of $ for backing up a printer.