Eaton PredictPulse Reviews

• Monitoring UPSs.
• Preventing failures.

We are using Eaton SecureConnect Installer Cloud, which is a private cloud deployment model.

The service has definitely quickly deployed field technicians. At one of our sites, the temperature in the room was rising. Because we received a notification, we were able to get an engineer dispatched to the site to the HVAC problem. Had we not done that, we might have ended up with a UPS failure.

We have found the most valuable features to be the ones which notify us that the UPS is on battery, then notifying us that the temperature in the room is too hot.

I like visibility the service provides into our UPS equipment through its reporting, but it could be better. I would like it to be easier to set up for the specific things I'd like to monitor and how we would like to get notified. E.g., I would like to have battery run-time be more of an alert because I don't really care when the unit goes on battery, as long as it goes on battery. However, something I would care about is if the battery was down below 10 percent. That would be something which would be good to get notified on. It would also be good to have past data to be able to drill into if something had happened a week ago to do failure analysis on. 

The stability seems great. We have not had any problems there.

When you look at it from the perspective of a national company like ours, it would be nice to be able to start at a high level, like by region, then drill down by service area, site, and then by building. That way there is some type of hierarchy set up. Because if you're monitoring all the UPSs, and there are 2000 UPSs in a company, that view could probably be a little better.

We have it at three sites. If we do decide to go with this product, then our goal is to get the network cards installed and get the UPSs on the network, then work with Eaton to get them connected.

There are three of us actively working on the solution. We're a part of a national facilities operations team. We're just focused on doing process improvement with UPSs right now.

I would recommend working with the same people that I have been working with.

It is the first pilot at Kaiser to have a monitoring system.

The initial setup is mostly straightforward once they get you set up. It's a little complex to get additional people setup. I have to go through Eaton to get it setup. Letting me manage users and access would be helpful.

The deployment was super fast. The long part was us getting our network card installed and getting it on the network. 

We used Eaton's consultants for the deployment. They were wonderful and very responsive. They not only answer my questions, but improve on them. They are great and very honest. If the product doesn't do something today, they tell me. If it's coming out in the next release, they say it's coming out in the next release. Or, if it's not even in the pipeline, they let me know and say that they will take the feedback. 

They have come to visit in person or we have spoken on the phone. Anything that we've needed, they have been helpful. They also helped push me information because this is one one-hundredth of the things that I'm working on. It's very nice to have them keep on top of me and keep things going. So, they have been terrific.

We use service vendors for deployment and maintenance. We have two separate service vendors who can assist if something was needed. They can go out to the site, if needed. We would dispatch them.

Right now, we are not paying anything for it, so the return on investment is great.

If you have a UPS failure, that will be very costly for many reasons. There has definitely been a return there. In the one example where the room got hot, we have no idea how much that would've cost if there had been a failure, but it would have been something that would have cost something. That alone has been a return on the investment.

We are not using Eaton's UPS service plans.

Eaton was only one who offered to let us try it out for free.

We are looking at other options still. We are still looking at Schneider's UPS monitoring solution. We have looked at quite a few others, but none of the others would meet our requirements. So far, we are only looking at these two.

PredictPulse has helped me better define our requirements.

One of the pros of PredictPulse is the majority of our UPSs and the support has been phenomenal. They seem very open to work with us on improvements for future releases and to learn more about what we need as well, so that has been nice.

One of the cons of the PredictPulse is that right now we can only use it on UPSs. From what I understand, that will change in the future. The national viewpoint and data logging are the things that I brought up which could be improved.

I don't think that we use Eaton for repair of these units.

The primary use case is notifications for all the Eaton UPS devices in our organization. This lets us know when the system is down or having other issues, as far as connectivity, input/output, battery level, and reports.

We are using the most recent version.

We now have knowledge of what is going on with power fluctuations. Before, when we were offsite, we wouldn't know if the system was down or if there was a power outage. Now, I get alerts. 

I receive my monthly reports from it, so I haven't needed to logon directly in a very long time.

I use the feature which alerts me to power outages, whether it is going on and off the battery. E.g., this feature came in handy last weekend when the Department of Water and Power took the power down. They said that it was for 12 hours, but it ended up being 14 hours. I could manage the readings on the batteries, ensure they weren't draining, and everything was okay. They made it through the whole outage.

We did have an issue getting it initially connected from our system through their particular email address. It was hard because we have a security parameter. It took two or three technicians to figure out that we had to remove the monitoring in our email addresses due to firewalls. We were blocking them and they were blocking us because the message would not always translate after it was encrypted leaving from us. We had to do a bit of work in our security email system to make our UPS system and PredictPulse part talk to their collection agent. I don't know why it happened. At one point, we could see them but they weren't picking up the pulses that were required to send back to us. This took work to resolve and could be streamlined.

I've had absolutely no trouble. I've had no repairs on it with zero problems.

It does not require any require any maintenance from me. If there was any issue, I would contact Eaton.

We only have one UPS.

We have not thought about increasing our usage of Eaton products at this time since we are not sure if we are going to stay in our building.

Eaton's field technician came out for service. The service was great. He was very experienced. We had only had the solution for a little while, so I had a lot of questions. He answered every last one of them without a problem. The last time that he came out was two years ago.

One time, we had an unscheduled outage. Eaton support called and let me know that we were having an issue, which was pretty cool.

The service is prompt. 

I haven't needed to contact Eaton's technical support because of PredictPulse.

We previously had a generator, which was insufficient. 

We had a small fire in our ceiling. Then, we had to get big giant fans to keep the room cool to keep the equipment going. It was pretty messy. So, we spent a lot of money in a very short time frame.

Now, when the UPS kicks on, the generator knows. If the UPS is running longer than five minutes, the generator kicks in.

The initial setup was straightforward.

An engineer from Eaton came in and set PredictPulse up. He explained everything to us, including the requirements. 

It was simple for me. He just needed to know who our electricians were. He worked with our electricians to get it set up. We didn't have any issues because we had to have the room wired for it and all the information was direct.

The service has earned its place in our life, a millions of times over. It was a lot of work to keep things going without it. E.g., we had our 14-hour outage and were just fine.

It is saving our organization around $10,000 a month.

We have bought all of the features of PredictPulse because each of them serves a different purpose for us.

We pay $4,000 for the Eaton 93PM UPS, which includes PredictPulse. It is a reasonable price.

We did evaluate other competitors, but we didn't have a lot of time. Eaton was the best because of its uptime and support. 

We decided to add on PredictPulse for the notifications. However, we did not look into competitors for the services.

Do it. PredictPulse sends out emails no matter where you are. You can keep track of the electric current going on in your system. It keeps you in the loop and knowledgeable. It will let you know when an issue has cleared. It is very much worth the expense.