Any EE's here familiar with US 60 hertz home power?

[ShadowsPapa]

We live out in the country at the very end of the electric grid in this area.
Storms and of course other loads on the lines can cause issues.
My wife has an APQS long-arm quilting machine with computer control.. It's a Linux-based tablet running what in essence is "CNC" software to automate some of the quilting she does. There are electronics and stepper motors as well as the DC motor that runs the machine itself and the Intelliquilter device has 2 stepper motors and control boards.
The quilting machine says max load 6.3 amps.
Everything (Log arm quilting machine AND the Iltelliquilter CNC equipment) runs easily off a 15 amp circuit. We need extreme clean sine wave power and the ability to keep the machine going in case of power failure until my wife can systematically shut it down.
Disaster if the machine stops but the computer control tries to keep going on the tablet battery.
I've been told by one of the more "educated" people at the company that makes these machines that we need sine wave UPS - not your typical Best Buy computer UPS.
To complicate things even more -
Also she has a Phaff Creative Design embroidery machine. It's like a modern sewing machine with stepper motors, a computer interface (touch screen, etc.) and an embroidery module that has a couple of motors that run the embroidery hoop while the machine stitches. She's seen some bad error messages that some claim is the result of dirty power. The guy who has last worked on it for her argues otherwise - he says it's not our power supply here but he does say the UPS isn't a bad idea - can then throw it back in the company's face if it crashes again.
So we also want sine wave back up for it that will supply clean power ALL the time, and allow systematic shutdown in case of power failure.

We've had the power company out with a recorder just to settle things - they showed the results - it's actually pretty clean and the voltage doesn't vary much at all. (not like one place I used to work at that would see voltage dips into the 90s). We have also replaced the entire breaker box, feed from the meter and everything else just because it was old and I don't like old crappy wiring and breakers you can't even buy used any more.

So, in summary - looking for a good pure sine wave "UPS" that would supply both machines in event of a power hiccup, or in case yet another derecho hits and knocks out our power for days - just need to run things long enough she can do a systematic shutdown and save her work and the position where she stopped. She can mark down the exact stitch number in the case of embroidery, IF she's the one that shuts it down.

Who has experience with these - and can speak to a good brand, the correct sizing, etc. ?

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[PancakeCritter]

Sorry to not directly answer your search for a sine wave UPS...

All of those DC motors and main board are getting power from an AC/DC rectifier. Where is the stringent waveform requirement coming from? Can you buy a regular UPS and do a dry run test?

A standard UPS from APC outputs 57 - 63 Hz for 60 Hz nominal input. Did they quantify what is acceptable?

As for sizing....Sounds like 10-20 minutes would be long enough? Assuming it only runs while someone is home.


P.S. - I feel your pain. We had the power go out in SoDak over the 4th, full house and still 90F+ outside. Had to roll out the emergency PTO generator from the 1960's lol.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

Sorry to not directly answer your search for a sine wave UPS...

All of those DC motors and main board are getting power from an AC/DC rectifier. Where is the stringent waveform requirement coming from? Can you buy a regular UPS and do a dry run test?

A standard UPS from APC outputs 57 - 63 Hz for 60 Hz nominal input. Did they quantify what is acceptable?

As for sizing....Sounds like 10-20 minutes would be long enough? Assuming it only runs while someone is home.


P.S. - I feel your pain. We had the power go out in SoDak over the 4th, full house and still 90F+ outside. Had to roll out the emergency PTO generator from the 1960's lol.

I haven't looked into how the motors are powered on these - there is a circuit board for each motor that runs the long arm machine carriage on the X and Y axis - one for each. And then there's motors that engage those motors to the table or disengages them, the quilting machine itself has a couple of long boards on it - it senses thread breakage or thread out conditions, senses movement of the machine when in manual mode to regulate stitch number and length, there's the motor that drives the part that sews - bobbin and the needle, there's a lot of motors on these plus the electronics. I don't really know how they are powered.

The embroidery machine is similar - a stepper motor runs the part that stitches, then there's a couple of motors that run the hoop - one for X and one for Y, and the touch screen and all of the electronics, USB port and more. It's quit 3 times on her, went into a horrible buzzing sound and locked and said "machine needs to rest" and if you look it up, everyone on all the forums said they've been told "dirty power". And those who have bought sine wave power supplies swear they've had no further issues. Not proof but it's as close as I can find.

The standard $79.95 UPS doesn't do true sine wave output, it appears to be more of a modified square wave or simulated sine wave.
My digging says that pure sine wave is necessary for certain equipment that's energy star rated above a certain point, CPAP (so far no worries there) and other equipment.
I'm also concerned about an inline system vs. one that has to switch over - some of the newer electronics are so sensitive that they go down if there's so much as an instant of no supply or the wave pattern is suddenly out of sync to what it was.
If I try and mess up a $30,000 machine, I'm toast. Even the embroider machine- to replace it I'm looking at over 8 grand if that gets messed up. So I'm a bit reluctant to "experiment".


When a bird farts, the power drops and comes back...... I have been saying for years - a bird must had landed on the wire out there, had to reset the clock on the microwave and stove again.
It's fine when it's fine - but one never knows. We can go 8 months and not a single drop - and then we have 2 months in a row where the power is out and we wait 8 to 10 hours for it to come back and that storm last summer - almost a week (at least it wasn't unbearable hot)
I wish I had kept my 656 and PTO generator - it would power an entire house, well, electric heat, AC, all of it. Had it on the farm so I bought a BIG one. But traded it for a trailer later.

 

[spectre6000]

I also live out on the edge of the grid, and experience the frequent brown outs and flickers. I don't have a EE degree, but I do a fair bit of it professionally. There are definitely devices and equipment that like a clean sine wave at a clean frequency, especially when precision is involved. I can easily imagine a lot of precision would be required for really clean stitching over such a wide area; a series of very small errors can cascade, and before you know it your design ends up stretching an inch off the... canvas? My mother has a Swiss machine (I forget the name of the manufacturer) that was something on the order of $20K. I don't think she runs it on a UPS, but I don't think the cost of failure on the scale it operates is nearly as high.

Fortunately, it's not incredibly difficult, and doesn't use extremely expensive components to clean up a notchy simulated sine wave (just some capacitors, and maybe a sensing circuit). I googled it, and sure enough, the sine wave UPSes aren't all that much more expensive. If you're talking $8K/$30K machinery, just play it safe and spend a few extra dollars on the UPS. If it's in the manual, or somehow tied to the warranty, it's cheap insurance. The cost of a single failed job (assuming at least some value for time) could pay for it to use another means of justification.

Actually... Typing that just now made me realize I DON'T have a UPS on a pair of pumps in a chemistry control system (the controller for which does have a UPS) that really should have some sort of power outage sensing at least... The part that does have a UPS can think the solution is way off, and start adjusting input such that when the power comes back on, it'll be dramatically overcorrected! Yikes!

 

[AggieJeep]

The sine wave requirement is specific to the load. Many devices just do not contain the necessary filtering to keep the standard trashy UPS supplies are often very ugly when examined with an o-scope. Most real computer supplies will filter ok. The “mechanical” gear you are driving can also generate noise back into the electric supply And affect sensitive gear plugged into the same circuit.

You could try separating the compute from mechanical, 2 supplies / UPS devices with some chokes employed to resist noisy transients being backfed into line power. This could be cheaper than one big sine wave Unit.

I often see very fast dropouts that could cause your kinds of issues. My office UPS gear will get tripped so quickly, you will not notice any light dips. I figure these might’ve due to the electric grid switching generation and loads around.

I haven’t seen a monitor from a utility lately to know if their resolution and capture abilities would catch such blips.

Edit: I live in the burbs, not really remote, and I still detect a lot of the very fast blips. Lights will hardly ever wink like we would see back in the day, but all of my UPS gear will click and throw an event.

Edit: I’m not a power EE guy, I focus on compute / telecom where power is quite important. I am sure we have a professional around here who may offer some very specific advice. Good luck.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

I also live out on the edge of the grid, and experience the frequent brown outs and flickers. I don't have a EE degree, but I do a fair bit of it professionally. There are definitely devices and equipment that like a clean sine wave at a clean frequency, especially when precision is involved. I can easily imagine a lot of precision would be required for really clean stitching over such a wide area; a series of very small errors can cascade, and before you know it your design ends up stretching an inch off the... canvas? My mother has a Swiss machine (I forget the name of the manufacturer) that was something on the order of $20K. I don't think she runs it on a UPS, but I don't think the cost of failure on the scale it operates is nearly as high.

Fortunately, it's not incredibly difficult, and doesn't use extremely expensive components to clean up a notchy simulated sine wave (just some capacitors, and maybe a sensing circuit). I googled it, and sure enough, the sine wave UPSes aren't all that much more expensive. If you're talking $8K/$30K machinery, just play it safe and spend a few extra dollars on the UPS. If it's in the manual, or somehow tied to the warranty, it's cheap insurance. The cost of a single failed job (assuming at least some value for time) could pay for it to use another means of justification.

Actually... Typing that just now made me realize I DON'T have a UPS on a pair of pumps in a chemistry control system (the controller for which does have a UPS) that really should have some sort of power outage sensing at least... The part that does have a UPS can think the solution is way off, and start adjusting input such that when the power comes back on, it'll be dramatically overcorrected! Yikes!

Besides the equipment itself - she does quilting for others - they send her the top they made, and a backing fabric. She (or rather I LOL) load it on the machine for her. Backing fabric, batting, then the top. Then she does the quilting on it. So she's got a quilt on the machine that may have $300-$500 worth of fabric and days worth of work - and if something goes goofy it can literally make holes. It's not happened but she had a close call a while back.

 

[MrZappo]

I run large scale data centers for a living. We work with commercial ups units every day.

APC is not what you need. Especially not the cheap consumer stuff. Those units are not something I would trust to protect anything over a few hundred bucks.

I normally work in the 500KW and larger size of units. I don't stay well versed in smaller units.

Minimally, you are looking at something that does online double conversion power. Converts from AC to DC and back to AC again. Only real way to clean up a commercially supplied sine wave.

Best to be inline so that the unit is not just providing power when power fails. This way you will always have exact voltage and wave purity.

I'll check into a few smaller units and post a few up.

The brands that are true pro grade non consumer crap would be something like Mitsubishi, Powerware, Liebert/Vertiv. Etc etc.

 

[Radio Guy]

I use a number of UPSs in my home and have had to spec them for work where they ranged in capacity from 500 watts to 1 megawatt. The smaller ones I've used are consumer/low end commercial and have worked well for general computer use, which doesn't care much about the frequency or stability. The problem I'm fixing with these is brown outs and brief total loss of power.

If your equipment is not frequency sensitive then most any major name brand UPS in the 1kW range should easily power your machine with the 6.3A rating for a safe amount of time to ride through brown outs or alert you so it can be shut down gracefully. If you need precise 60Hz frequency their are models that provide that at additional cost.

I have at least six 500w UPSs in my home to back up various computers, routers, WiFi access points, alarm and security cameras with DVR. We have occasional brown outs and outages here and the equipment just keeps working. You do have to test the batteries often and replace every few years to keep the capacity near advertised spec.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

The sine wave requirement is specific to the load. Many devices just do not contain the necessary filtering to keep the standard trashy UPS supplies are often very ugly when examined with an o-scope. Most real computer supplies will filter ok. The “mechanical” gear you are driving can also generate noise back into the electric supply And affect sensitive gear plugged into the same circuit.

You could try separating the compute from mechanical, 2 supplies / UPS devices with some chokes employed to resist noisy transients being backfed into line power. This could be cheaper than one big sine wave Unit.

I often see very fast dropouts that could cause your kinds of issues. My office UPS gear will get tripped so quickly, you will not notice any light dips. I figure these might’ve due to the electric grid switching generation and loads around.

I haven’t seen a monitor from a utility lately to know if their resolution and capture abilities would catch such blips.

No way to split stuff out, it's all built and tied together. And the computer part of things controls the motors through another board. It's impractical to try to re-engineer it and likely wouldn't operate anyway. Support would be gone.

 

[MrZappo]

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[ShadowsPapa]

I run large scale data centers for a living. We work with commercial ups units every day.

APC is not what you need. Especially not the cheap consumer stuff. Those units are not something I would trust to protect anything over a few hundred bucks.

I normally work in the 500KW and larger size of units. I don't stay well versed in smaller units.

Minimally, you are looking at something that does online double conversion power. Converts from AC to DC and back to AC again. Only real way to clean up a commercially supplied sine wave.

Best to be inline so that the unit is not just providing power when power fails. This way you will always have exact voltage and wave purity.

I'll check into a few smaller units and post a few up.

The brands that are true pro grade non consumer crap would be something like Mitsubishi, Powerware, Liebert/Vertiv. Etc etc.

Thank you - THAT is the word I was forgetting - double conversion.
We also have to consider - what if the power is down for days (like happened last August) or even a couple of days - and we end up running on a generator. Generator output sucks. It's really dirty.

We want to avoid the switching, be able to use the equipment if on a generator and to keep the power clean because people who have the same embroidery machine she has - multiple people have said they were told it was "dirty power". The fact it can run perfectly for months and then suddenly act up, and no one can find anything wrong, and then it works for another year before it acts up........ makes me wonder. She doesn't use that one daily - weekly is more like it but still.
The big quilting machine gets used a lot.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

Like this

This is what one company suggested - I'd rather have just ONE UPS instead of two and have the outlets the machines are on run right to the UPS.

From one company -
At 6 amps you would be at about 720w for the embroidery machine. This SRT1500XLA can support up too 1350w max, you would get about 12 mins with the 6 amp load.

Is the other machine about the same in power consumption?

Here is the SRT1500XLA

 

[MrZappo]

Here is another

As long as you use a commercial grade online double conversion ups, size is only a concern as far as it is within your wattage requirements and you have calculated the runtime based on your draw.

You need to know:

1) That the unit will supply the wattage you need.

2) That it has enough batteries to supply that wattage for the amount of time you need. Or that it is modular in design so that your can add batteries in the chassis or that you can daisy chain more batteries to it via cables to add runtime to meet your requirements now or in the future.

3) That you have a place for the unit that will not exceed it's temperature requirements normally or in a power outage situation. If your ups overheats when your air conditioning goes out at the same time it is not useful. Obviously.

4) That the area you kept it is relatively stable from a temperature standpoint and can be maintained below about 78 degrees which will decrease the battery life by half. Not that it won't work but can get expensive.

Stay away from Tripp-lite, apc, cyberpower, dell, and other consumer grade junk.

It is far better to buy the smallest ups offered by a company that manufactures large commercial ups units than it is to buy the largest product from a company who manufactures tiny stuff.

And if you have a decent generator, th we units should do fine. Install a ATS and never worry again.

 

[AggieJeep]

Like this

Agree.

This is what one company suggested - I'd rather have just ONE UPS instead of two and have the outlets the machines are on run right to the UPS.

From one company -
At 6 amps you would be at about 720w for the embroidery machine. This SRT1500XLA can support up too 1350w max, you would get about 12 mins with the 6 amp load.

Is the other machine about the same in power consumption?

Here is the SRT1500XLA

A single unit would be best, my earlier suggestion was a bit more on-the-cheaper side.

I would suggest measuring the typical loads (current draw) for both machines. Then decide how much time you need. That should get you to a sound investment.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

Agree.


A single unit would be best, my earlier suggestion was a bit more on-the-cheaper side.

I would suggest measuring the typical loads (current draw) for both machines. Then decide how much time you need. That should get you to a sound investment.

If she can get 5 or 6 minutes time, that's fine. She'd be there, she'd pause or stop the work, save the information and do a systematic shutdown. They don't like to be just turned off, either.


(Sort of like the rectifier/power supply I use for plating, don't just unplug it, use the switch as it performs some sort of systematic shutdown, saves settings, etc. then shuts off. I really should have it on a UPS as well. )

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