Lettuce discuss battery backups

GoReefin · Dec 13, 2020

Hi all, I am in a somewhat unique situation in that my reef tank is set up at my work office and I am not in the office on the weekends. If there is a power outage I would not know until I came in on Monday morning to see the carnage. Therefor, I am looking into back up batteries. I would like to run my main return pump 30ish watts and a single heater 200watts. ambient tempurature is around 75ish degrees. I doubt the heater would be on non-stop I have about 40 gallons of water (2 fluval 13.5g systems plumbed into a 20g sump)

Unfortunately given my circumstances I am unable to tie in a generator at my office to power the tank in instances of power outages.

I was thinking about this backup battery pack. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/goal-z...02&gclid=COK1iaWizO0CFUkYfwodyskCNA&gclsrc=ds

Does anyone else have experience with this?

Thank you all.

laverda · Dec 13, 2020

You don't get much power for the money with that one. 1400Amps * 110Volts = 15400VA You get pretty much the same power with this for a lot less money if I am correct. APC 1500 Pro UPS. APC makes one capable of using a larger external battery for even more power. I got this one on amazon although I paid way less for it. APC 1500 UPS with extra battery capability.

GoReefin · Dec 13, 2020

laverda said:
You don't get much power for the money with that one. 1400Amps * 110Volts = 15400VA You get pretty much the same power with this for a lot less money if I am correct. APC 1500 Pro UPS. APC makes one capable of using a larger external battery for even more power. I got this one on amazon although I paid way less for it. APC 1500 UPS with extra battery capability.

I have the same one in my home it works great but not sure it would run my heater and pump longer than say 4 hours or so.

Timfish · Dec 14, 2020

I don't have any experience with the Yeti Goal Zero linked too and would suggest finding more reviews than just the 7 listed on the link. I have had issues with UPS designed for computers. Many are designed to only run at the rated AH or AW irregardless of the load plugged into them so may only run 20 or 30 minutes even with a much smaller load than they are rated for. I suspect a better choice might be a wavemaker with a dedicated backup battery. A cheap alternateive I've found to work surprisingly well is Penn Plax's B10 battery operated air pump that turns on when power is lost. it's cheap and I've tried several and they'll run 3-4 days with 2 D cell batteries (one ran almost 6 days but I wouldn't expect or plan on it).

laverda · Dec 14, 2020

Mine with the add on battery pack will run a tunze pump for days. The same set up ran my old 130 watt return pump for about 6 hours on several occasions. That was enough to get me through all but one power outage over the 15 years I had that tank.
You need to look at the wave form out put of any back up. Most below 1000VA do not put out a full sin-wave causing pumps and motors to run hot and not get the expected battery run time.
Your heater is 10 times more current than your return pump so it is going to run the battery down fast. If you have room for a seperate heater I would set it to a lower temp as temperature is not as critical as circulation is for our tanks. Also it may make more sense to run a Tunze pump or other flow pump as they use less current then a typical return pump and will run much longer on battery.
What ever way you go, I suggest you test it out before you need it so you know if it will do what to expect it to.

GoReefin · Dec 14, 2020

laverda said:
Mine with the add on battery pack will run a tunze pump for days. The same set up ran my old 130 watt return pump for about 6 hours on several occasions. That was enough to get me through all but one power outage over the 15 years I had that tank.
You need to look at the wave form out put of any back up. Most below 1000VA do not put out a full sin-wave causing pumps and motors to run hot and not get the expected battery run time.
Your heater is 10 times more current than your return pump so it is going to run the battery down fast. If you have room for a seperate heater I would set it to a lower temp as temperature is not as critical as circulation is for our tanks. Also it may make more sense to run a Tunze pump or other flow pump as they use less current then a typical return pump and will run much longer on battery.
What ever way you go, I suggest you test it out before you need it so you know if it will do what to expect it to.

Makes sense. I will make sure everything works as expected when I do my set up. What temperature is critical for a reef tank? Ambient temps here in SoCal can get down to 70ish in the office.

Cell · Dec 14, 2020

I wouldnt want to leaf my tank without power for long.

laverda · Dec 14, 2020

Gjunon said:
Makes sense. I will make sure everything works as expected when I do my set up. What temperature is critical for a reef tank? Ambient temps here in SoCal can get down to 70ish in the office.

I don’t know the specific answer to that. I have seen threads where tank temps dropped to 70 and everything was fine, but with out circulation and oxygenation everything will die very quickly. Perhaps set the heater to 72 degrees. I imagine what your animals can tolerate depends to some extent on what you keep your tank at normally. If you normally keep it at 82, a drop to 72 is a bigger deal than if you normally keep your tank at 76 degrees. My tanks runs cooler in winter. My main tank is about 3 degrees cooler in winter at 76.5 min and 79 max. My other is closer to 5 degrees cooler in winter at 76 minimum and 80.6 max in summer mostly because it is in the garage.

TankCandy · Dec 14, 2020

+1 on getting a pure sine wave UPS. Otherwise voltage can get dirty and start to clip.

I got a Cyberpower 1500VA and have a Apex EB 8 going into the "critical"battery backup with just my pumps and powerheads. I then have another eb8 going into the "non critical" outlet on the UPS this way i have time to get the generator up and running without my 800w heater using up all my power. With just the return pump and powerheads I have a solid 90 minutes runtime.

GoReefin · Dec 14, 2020

It seems generally best to have a batter back up for the pump to run. I have 6 anemones in 1 tanks and lps/softies in the other. I run my tank at 79 degrees. I appreciate everyone's input so far. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts. I'll look into just plugging in my return pump 30ish watts to the back up battery. Longest power has been out in this area is around 8 hours.