Eaton UPS Reviews

Our primary use case is mission-critical: data centers, communication closets, building automation systems, our utility plants. All our critical systems are run on Eaton.

Our organization has over 20 three-phase units. We've got the 9395s and a 9355s, the 480V three-phase and the 120V three-phase.  Looking forward to leveraging 93PM and the next generation of products

Their UPSs do their job. The argument goes that you find out that UPSs fail when you need them. Knowing these units are going to work allows me to sleep at night. I have a proven track record with them. They just always work. I've never had a problem, not power glitches, nothing. That is exactly what they're supposed to do. 

The two things that I like are the ESS, its related components, and the bypass sync, which means if there's a problem with the UPS I can mechanically wrap around it without going to static bypass. Eaton has one of the few units on the market that will do that.

Because we're running mission-critical loads, in the event I have a failure of the UPS where I can't go to static bypass before I go to maintenance bypass, I'm screwed. I risk losing the entire load. The Eatons allow me to go to maintenance bypass, which means paralleling on an alternate power source, and then take the UPS out without static. So if I have a failure, there is a minimal risk of losing a data center to repair the UPS - and that has saved me at least once. I had an alternate vendor where I wound up spending about $180,000 in mitigation - we had to provide temporary power, staffing, and a great deal of time coupled with risk because the UPS had a fault and I couldn't go to bypass. 

The alternate vendor's K13 contactor failure meant I could not go to static bypass safely. There was a 50/50 chance a unit would drop the load. On my Eaton, we had a component failure where it was unclear what the unit was doing. It was still maintaining load. I don't remember specifically what the part was, but it was one of the control systems. We were concerned that going to static bypass would have been problematic and Eaton Field Engineer said, "But it's not an issue, you can go to maintenance bypass and then we can fix it."

We learned the issue was resolved with a firmware upgrade It was never an issue. Though concerned if I moved the UPS to static bypass it would drop the load. Because of the way the Eatons work, I simply could have gone to maintenance bypass and never have had an issue. That means I would have had a mission-critical room that I don't lose.

One of the other key features that I like is ESS (Energy Saver System) for it's cost avoidance. What it allows the unit to do is run on utility power. The UPS units are smart enough and fast enough that 99 percent of the time, if utility power is clean, the UPSs operate on utility power allowing the batteries to rest.  Because the batteries are resting more than being drained in double conversion, we have seen battery strings operate 8+ years without issue.  Normally UPS batteries are replaced every three to four years. I can now get six to eight years out of the batteries providing for a large cost avoidance. When you're looking at a million-dollar battery replacement, to be able to push that out three years is an enormous saving. That's on the VRLAs.  With Lithium-Ion advances and cost reductions we are looking at a large paradigm shift to this model. 

The reason I stay with Eaton is consistency and reliability, and also the service organization. To me, Eaton provides some of the best service. I use the manufacture for my big iron. I do not use third-party maintenance for Critical Load situations. One, Eaton's been very competitive for me. There have really been no cost savings utilizing a third-party.  An advantage of using the manufacturer for service is direct access to engineers. If there is an issue, and everyone will have an issue at sometime, the field techs call the Eaton engineers. By leveraging the manufacturer access to parts is a given!  If there is an issue I don't want to wait for people to show up or argue the issue.  

VMMS is a good feature. There are multiple charging units inside each UPS. For example, on my 9395 I have three to four charging units.  The units are at full capacity the charging units will rotate on and offer similar to a lead/lag model.  This saves energy as well stages to meet capacity.   

Most of my units are large, 480v, three-phase units.  The industry is working to reduce footprint which is valuable.   Units are getting more dense and feature rich.  Advances in transformerless and Lithium-Ion are game changes.

The biggest improvement I would like to see is the remote monitoring and management. All the interfaces should match. The unit touch screen, Web interface, and other remote options should provide the same information and it can never be enough!  Presently the touch screens and web based interfaces look and function differently.  I want to know what this unit is doing. I want to be able to track and trend the data. .

The only other features I would like to see are technology improvements, which they're doing anyway. At what point do you go to transformerless? At what point do you have better caps? 

UPS operate in a simple matter.  improvements in software, contactors, coupled with transformerless and Lithium-Ion are disruptive technologies.  All the vendors are doing it and making it available. From an improvement perspective, they're on the right path. There isn't anything major that I can jump up and say, "I wish you would do this better."

On the single-phase units, I'd like to see ESS and Lithium-Ion through the produce line down to the 50k units.  These are coming!

I've been using Eaton UPSs going on 14 years.

It's rock-solid.

The units I have are scalable, to a point.  When putting in large units you spec for what the target capacity is.  In the end one may delay some charging modules but all the core infrastructure, cable, footprint, etc, must be in place day one.  If I'm buying one of these big 9395 units, I'm buying half-a-megawatt plus.  Eaton makes a lot of scalable units. They make the 93PM and the 9395 now has some great options for scalability.

The problem with scalability is, while they all do it, you're going to pay for it. If I'm going to go into an environment where I don't know what my load is going to, I don't want to buy two-and-a-half meg on day-one because I don't need it. But you've got to build everything for that on day-one: all the cables, the battery plans, the breakers; the frame has to be there.

If you're willing to spend that, then great. Most of the time, even in today's environments, it's the little ones that are scalable. You can start out with 25 Kw and go to 150. But if I want to start out at half-a-meg, and I'm going to scale to two meg, that's a different animal. I can do that with both of them. If I'm willing to pay for it, they have options. 

Do I think Eaton has scalable products? Yes, I do. And they met the needs that I have had in the past. Do I see value in scalability? I have yet to realize in my environments.

The Service Plan doesn't result in faster repair time because my repair times are so fast anyway. I've got four-hour response times on my units. If I have a problem with the unit, I get somebody here, 24/7, within four hours. 

One of the beauties of their sales team is they build relationships, so I'm not always calling an 800-number saying, "Hey, I need help," where the reply is, "Okay, where are you? What time zone are you in?" I can call my technicians 24/7 and say, "I have a problem" and they are on the way!  Granted there is little concern as I am under contract. Eaton's service team in the Chicago Metro area is a very personable team, all the way up to the VP of Service. They're focused on customer service and it shows in the relationships I've had with them.

The last issue we had a technician come down for was a battery issue. Sadly the issue was me not interpreting the alarm appropriately which simply had to be cleared. They came out and took the time to teach me.

Another time I got a UPS wet and blew it. That was exciting. We had a leak. It actually leaked through a 12-inch concrete slab above it. It was like a Rube Goldberg puzzle. We had a leak upstairs that traveled 20 feet across the concrete floor, found a crack, slid through the crack in the floor, into a conduit that's been in the concrete for a hundred years, down the concrete and then out of an abandoned electrical box in the concrete ceiling. It dripped on a piece of Unistrut, slid over about three feet, and dropped on a high-voltage energy bus. You can't make these things up.

The UPS did what it was supposed to do but we got it wet. The UPS went from ESS to double conversion, to bypass, back to double conversion, back to ESS, in 72 milliseconds. The way a UPSs works is if there's a large in-rush, which means a whole bunch of equipment needs a lot of power at once, the UPSs actually lets the utility handle it.  In an in-rush, my load will peak up, my draw will peak up. The UPSs will watch the inrush and grab the load when the demand stabilizes.  Under normal circumstance all would have been good.  Lesson of the day, keep equipment dry! 

I've have some GE & APC units and I'll tell you the same thing I've told every one of those vendors: When dealing with a product at this caliber, I can't go wrong with any of them. If I buy a Mitsubishi unit or a Liebert unit, they're all good units, bar none. Each vendor will debate why theirs is better bet in the end all will do the job.  The key is what is the right product at the time I'm going to buy which meets my needs. Who's got the best feature set, the richest feature set, the best price, and the best capabilities. What is the best return on my money at the end of the day.

Once that's said, it really comes down to the service organization and the reliability of the units. I have had issues with all the products and I am sure everyone out there has as well.  It's just I have had fewer issues with my Eatons than they have had with their other vendors.

I also believe in standards. Once I've picked a product line, my first choice for the next unit would be Eaton.  There are economies of scale having so many of them.

It comes down to this: When Eaton comes out to service units, they spend two-three days, and can cover them all. I'm not having to multiple vendors and schedule visits which consume my time.  I have one throat to choke, one contract, and one great relationship.  As a corporation, they still have the flexibility to be able to deal with the customer in that manner. Today, their service and customer relationships are their biggest value, absolutely, compared to the competitors I deal with.

The Eaton service organization is one of their strongest points.

I'm not an engineer or an electrician. For me, the ease/complexity of the setup is a hard question to answer because the field people do it. My observations are based on watching my electricians install my units and watching and working with the field engineers through the startup. It seems relatively straightforward. Plug component A into component B, run a wire from this terminal to that terminal. It seems very straightforward.

When the field techs have to do startups, it takes time to work through the details.  This is all scheduled!  When you're putting one, two, or two-and-a-half megawatts of UPS, there's an enormous amount of potential energy and danger. If they want to take a day or two to put these things in, I'm not going to argue with them, because I want it done right.

The installation depends on how fast you can put a 1000's of pounds of equipment.  You've just got to put big, heavy things in place and run big thick, heavy wires. You're running two dozen wires that are as big as your thumb and they're heavy; the wire is two-and-a-half pounds a foot. It's a lot of man-handling but I would say it's been relatively straightforward.

Is Eaton any better or different than any other UPS vendors on the market?  From providing backup power not really.  From how they do it, I can only say they have treated me well!

ROI is an extremely hard number to quantify. If a data center goes offline, the teaching and learning process at the University, and all the financial systems, hiccup. It would inconvenience an enormous amount of people. Some people would not teach because they can't get to electronic data. The cost of how many people would really go idle is difficult to calculate. 

Where the recovery comes in, with the amount of people involved, the numbers could get into the $70,000 s to $100,000 an hour number simply having faculty and staff idle people. It starts to add up.

In a previous position we calculated downtime at about $60,000 an hour, depending on the plant. Just idling staff cost that much. In higher-ed, what's more critical to the impact than idling people is the data. I have to protect the data. There are people whose life's work is literally sitting on a computers in one of my data centers. A faculty member who spent his entire life researching a subject may have his data sits on a computer in my data center. If that computer has a problem, he literally can lose his life's work. Granted backups should be in place and normally are. 

When you bid these large units I fin them all within a single-digit percentage point of each other. I can't make a bad decision. It's just what's the right decision at that moment in time? They're all cost-competitive.

I do pay for a service contract to Eaton every year. I do it through a third-party, but it's all Eaton paper. We do that because of the Ts and Cs - getting contracts mutually agreed to with all the legal teams is challenging thus I leverage a third party to help with this.  I have the luxury of dealing with Eaton direct or leverage my VAR as needed.  Either way communications between all parties is strong!

If you're thinking of implementing Eaton, reach out to their customers and then go talk to them. I make myself available to Eaton, nationwide. If they want to see my systems, I'll talk to them. I tell them good and bad. Eaton's not perfect. We've had a couple of bumps in the road, but we worked together and we've solved them, in a very positive.

You're going to have problems. The key is you judge character: how do you respond in a crisis. When I went out to bid recently, I even told Eaton: "It's pretty hard to negotiate when I'm telling all my bidders they have to come to you for my big-iron contracts." Eaton could have taken advantage of the situation but did not!  They continue to be competitive. 

The biggest lesson I've learned from using these UPSs is that you get what you pay for. The one-sentence summary of the value of the Eaton is that I sleep well at night.

Eaton's lithium-ion batteries were not a factor in our decision to go with their UPSs. All the manufacturers are buying the same batteries and cabinets.

PredictPulse, in my opinion, is valuable. But I also feel it's overpriced at this time.  We monitor, track and trend our units 24x7. If there's an alarm, I get a text and an email and somebody is responding to it. Where PredictPulse is valuable is that it's looking across 10,000+ units and says, "Hey, you know what? We're seeing this component failure," or "Based on this information, we think you should probably fix your caps or change your fans." Or, "We've got a firmware update and we've seen problems. We're putting a fix on our firmware. Next time we're out we'll put this in." That's where it's valuable. 

I do like where PredictPulse notifies Eaton Service team if there is an alarm.  Having Eaton see the alarm in near real time brings peace of mind.  I continue to evaluate PredictPulse.  My guess as more customers utilize the price will come down.  

The touch screen functionality is fine but to me it's overrated. I don't know why they have it. Well, I do know why they have it because they need to "keep up with the Jones's." It's fine. It does what I want it to do. It tells me all the information.  From a practicality perspective, it serves one function: It's a showpiece. Most of us don't touch the panels.  I want to monitor remotely and that is a complaint I have.  The remote monitoring software does not provide the same information that the touch screen provides and neither provide me the same information that the field techs can draw out of the unit when they directly connect to them.

I use Eaton transformers but I don't use their in-cabinet power strips for one reason. Not because they don't make a good product, but because I use an alternate vendor.  The vendor I use fully assemble the cabinet with a number of components and the PDU's at the factor.    The cabinet shows up, I roll it off a pallet, and I'm done.

I do have some Eaton PDUs, but I don't have a lot of them. Most of my big breakers are all Eaton. My big step-down transformers in my data centers are Eaton. I'm Eaton, cradle-to-grave, from the utility switchgear coming all the way into my distribution. I've drunk the "Kool-Aid" of Eaton. What it allows me to do is that if I ever have a problem, I get to go to them and say, "Look, the whole thing is yours." It's cradle-to-grave. It's their product.

They're price-competitive and from a technical perspective they're at the top of the game. I could buy Square D, but then I'm buying Square D breakers. I'm buying somebody's UPS and somebody else's distribution and somebody else's paralleling gear. The fact that I can pick up the phone and call one vendor and say, "Here, design this for me end-to-end," and they say, "Okay, not a problem," saves me time and headaches.

I did have a problem with one design.  The project fell just short of specifications.  After working with the engineering department a solution was put in place.  In the end the issue was resolve! 

It's hard to say how much downtime the solution has saved our organization because, other than the unit getting wet, long story, I haven't had any power outages in ten years now. The Data Center I have has never been down due to a power outage.  We've seen blinks in power transfers from the utility company, but to me it's an unquantifiable number, unless you're seeing really bad power all the time, where you're seeing brownouts and blackouts. I haven't had a power outage in any of the Eaton systems that I have. 

In terms of maintenance, somebody comes out twice a year. We do a major/minor PM on all our enterprise UPS units. During the first visit they check the software, the firmware, the alarms. On a "major" they upgrade the firmware. The units have to be shut them down,  everything is checked, make sure all the connections are tight, the caps are tight. They do electrical tests, all the capacitors and the electrical components, making sure everything is solid and tight. The battery comes out twice a year, although for the VRLAs I have them come out quarterly. They check every battery, every connection. They make sure the volts and ohms are right, the right resistance. That's one of the reasons these units work so long, because we do a lot of maintenance. 

Other than that, we track and trend all our UPS units every few minutes.  My operations center watches all our system 24/7.  Alarms are reviewed near real time. The care and feeding of these units, to me, is no different than the care and feeding of any other critical system.

I would rate Eaton as a corporation, not the Eaton UPS, as a nine out of ten. In a world like mine, I don't build relationships based on products. I build relationships based on the sales and service teams. If I'm buying a lot of product from a company but the salesperson leaves the company, I will evaluate the value of the my relationship.  There is a potential I will follow the sales and service teams.  The relationship is with the person, not the company. The Eaton people that have come to the table nationwide have been stellar.

I would rate Eaton UPSs at as a nine as well. There are little things they could do, like fix their interfaces and give me more data.

We use them for network backup or lab backup. These are critical environments for us, environments that we want to keep up in case of loss of power. They have high business impact. We have about 100 Eaton UPSs deployed.

The versions we are currently using that are the new standard are the 93PMs. But we have used all the other ones, the 9390s, the 95s, the 9350s, the 9355s - almost their whole product line.

They provide us reliable battery backup. They also provide energy savings that other units may not provide.

We have instances all the time where we are glad that we have UPSs. There are usually utility problems here or there. We're a pretty large campus and we're pretty spread out throughout the Puget Sound area. Whenever there's a utility event, we're glad we have battery backup through Eaton's units. In the last two months, we've had three utility power events where we had to go to battery. All 100 of the Eaton UPSs did their job and kept the equipment online that we want online. If the UPSs weren't in place, we would've lost power to revenue-generating spaces or to critical environments that need to stay up. That would impact the business and impact our ability to do our jobs.

The savings, by not being down, in terms of impact on revenue, is probably in the millions of dollars a year. It's a tough number to pin down for us. There are some places where it's a network location and there isn't much of an impact on anybody; just the network goes down and there's an issue of productivity for an entire building. But then you have a lab that is being backed up, a lab that generates $1,000,000 every five minutes and that's kind of hard to equate. So the actual savings could go back and forth. I would feel comfortable saying millions a year in savings or in business-impact avoidance.

We like the ESS, the Energy Saver System. It saves us on our electrical bill. That's a good feature. There's are two parts to that. By using the ESS, we get a rebate from the local utility of about half-a-million dollars. The actual savings over the year are probably only about $4,000, but I don't know if that is per unit or for the room where we did the study. It provides us a moderate amount of electrical savings throughout the lifetime of the unit.

We also like the modular system and the easy-to-read display. 

The touch-screen functionality is easy to read. There are tabs at the top and there are statuses at the top, graphics that give you a quick glance. We use the touch-screen for metering, to make sure the input and output meters are good. We also check alarm events and system history. Those are the things we usually check the most.

In addition to the display, there's a color methodology to the front display on the front cabinet. There are green, red, or amber. They provide quick graphics to understand if we have a real problem or a minor problem. The Eaton UPSs are user-friendly.

From a functional standpoint, I don't have any issues. From a communication standpoint, I don't have any issues. Outside of a full-service contract, my only concern is technician availability for repairs. Where we don't have a full-service contract with them, which unfortunately is the larger portion of our equipment from them, we're just like anybody else, waiting for a slot for a technician to arrive.

It is a risk, but when you're a big client like we are, they move other people around to get us serviced. If I was a smaller client, I would be at the bottom of the barrel and that would probably be annoying.

The stability has been perfect. I don't have any real issues with them except that they recently put out a service bulletin. They're here fixing that issue. That's kind of like a recall on a car. I almost don't want to mention that because it's not that big of a deal, but it's one of the more recent issues that has become something of a problem.

The scalability is great. You usually just swap in another power module. If we put in a 50 kVA unit and we want to upsize, or the customer wants to upsize, typically we can either just throw in one more power module to bring them up to double, or we just add another power module cabinet and then we add more capacity.

Tech support is good. I don't have any issues. I usually reach out to someone via email. Usually, when I call, I get forwarded to an engineer or I have to wait until somebody to call me back. Normally, what I end up doing is that if I have a problem that I think impacts us or our customer, I'll just send an email to one of their service managers or one of their sales managers. The response time is usually good. I get a pretty immediate response, definitely within the day.

We use a T&M contract with them in general, but for one of our offsite locations we do have a full-service contract with them. The latter, in terms of battery/parts replacement, remote monitoring, and prevention of UPS failures is fine. I don't have any issues with it. Once they're under full contract, they're pretty responsive and able to dispatch somebody immediately. I believe we have parts coverage with that full-service contract and they usually have the parts fairly quickly.

The other UPSs we're using are from Eaton's direct competitors, which is Vertiv or Liebert.

I do not do the setups, but I have spoken to the electrical vendors who do them and they don't have any real issues with them. It's pretty straightforward. They've probably installed 50 of them over the last couple of years. It takes about a day for them to get one all set up and then we bring Eaton in for the factory start-up. It's usually done over the course of a weekend.

We just did an install and we had two to three electricians from our staff involved because we have to run conduit and new pipe and bending. It's usually two to three of our electricians and one to two of the Eaton technicians who show up for start-up.

We use a third-party electrician, Valley or Cochran. Our technicians are more on the maintenance side. They don't do installs.

Our experience with both third-parties has been good. They're direct competitors and they each get about 50/50 of the work here. We're fine with either one.

The ROI is mostly in saving us from losing money, which would be in the millions of dollars. The return on investment would also be captured through the ESS program. However, even if that is $4,000 a year, it's going to be quite a while before we get to ROI. To get to ROI, we have to have the machine set in place for its full life cycle, which is 20 years.

That means a lot of the new ones are still 20 years out, but we've got some machines that are 20 years old and still in service. Over their lifetimes we've probably gotten back our money.

I usually get the pricing of the overall project when it's complete. I want to say they are around $50,000 to $70,000 depending on the options and the modules that we get.

With Eaton - and this is something of a detractor - I have to give them a PO with a minimum dollar amount. With Vertiv, I just have to call them out. I don't have to give them a PO upfront. They know we're going to pay so they don't need that. It gets them on campus quicker. With Eaton, I have to go through the entire payment process and I don't understand that, given that we're as large as we are as a company and do so much business with them. That's something to flag as our biggest gripe.

As for services costs, I don't know what they are. Their full-service contract is pretty expensive, but we normally don't buy that, so I don't know if they're competitive within the market itself. We only have a service contract like that with Eaton at one site. That site with the full-service has 50 UPSs and it's more expensive than the site where I have 100 UPSs which are only on a T&M contract. For us, the full-service is on the expensive end, but I don't have any comparison. I don't know what Vertiv's price would be on that.

We try to be fair to both of our vendors that are competitors. We do a 50/50 split. If we do Eaton on one job, maybe we'll do Vertiv on the next job. I don't really have a preference. If I can keep it to those two, we're pretty good. I don't have any issues that would make one worse or better than the other.

We're fairly happy with using Eaton products. I'm confident that if someone says they're going to install Eaton, they're getting a good product, that it's reliable and they won't have too many issues with it. And if they don't know anything about UPSs, they should get the service plan. If they're moderately knowledgeable about the UPSs they should just stick with a T&M.

The footprint is good. It's definitely in line with their competitors. They've all gone to a modular system across the entire industry. So instead of having one big cabinet for the IO and then one big cabinet for all the power modules, DC caps, etc., they've modularized them. They're in separate modules which lets them reduce the footprint. The footprint is fine for both IT and lab applications.

We have one installation on campus with their lithium-ion batteries. We are piloting them. We will play with them for about a year before we move forward with them in a bigger footprint on campus. The lithium-ion batteries were not a factor in our decision to go with this solution. We already use Eaton no matter what.

The Eaton UPSs do require maintenance. They have an OEM suggested maintenance, which we perform. We have to touch them four times a year. On my staff I've got three technicians. We also bring in one technician from a third-party vendor, MC Dean, for the annual services. In total, within one year, we're talking a team of four. For normal, run-through-the-year maintenance, when we to have to do this or that with a unit, there are five people on staff, including me. Three of them are PM techs. They do the battery PMs and the semi-annual services, and then we have the one technician from MC Dean who does the annual services. I've also got one technician who does all the communications side of the UPSs, who makes sure they are up and running, that they stay connected to our monitoring system, and he reviews and accepts alarms.

I would give Eaton products a ten out of ten, but overall, including service and everything, I'd give them an eight out of ten.

We use them for our data center backup and our telecommunications equipment room (TER) and our TER backups for our data systems. We use Centralized UPS for all of our telecom rooms and in our data centers and TERs, as well as throughout our facility and hospitals buildings.

We currently have four units and are getting ready to swap out a GE unit, putting an Eaton in, then we will have five units in total.

We are using both the 9395 and 93PM versions.

In our new hospital building, the compressors went bad in one of our MRI units. The vendor who is under maintenance contract for those claimed that the compressor failures were due to power surges into the facility, but we didn't have any data logs of this anywhere else except for in the UPS. The log data for the UPS is fed from the same branch system as the compressors for the MRIs, so we were able to go back and look at all the Eaton data logs of whenever they said that this event occurred. It did not show any information there. We were able to use that information to argue against the vendor that we did not have any bad power coming into the building. We also had our power company provide documentation saying that they did not report any bad power coming to us, as well. We have a direct circuit from our substations, so they are able to monitor from the substation. Between the two of them, we were able to save our facility $40,000 in service costs that the vendor was trying to make us pay for.

We have been able to get the data logs from them, which has helped us in dispelling some rumors (or accusations) that we have bad power by different vendors throughout the hospital. This has occurred several times for us. The logs have helped us a lot. 

The product is reliable. We previously used individual UPSs in every telecom room. By moving to Centralized UPSs, it is lower maintenance. We have just one guy (one of our supervisors) who oversees all the UPSs. He is the system supervisor. Through our Cellwatch system, which is connected to all of them, he is able to see what the status of all those UPSs are. Then, he is able to monitor the battery conditions. Because they are all the same, it limits the training and everything that you have to know between the different systems. This has helped us on the manpower side of things by lowering the manpower needed to maintain them.

We like the touch screen functionality. I have not personally had a lot of experience with it, though my supervisor has. He likes to be able to navigate through it, while our older GE system does not have this functionality. The GE system is very plain with just a few buttons, and it's very difficult to get information out of it. Eaton's touch screen functionality was something that was very quick to impress everybody with its ability to get to everything.

We use the touch screen functionality to monitor for battery life, the amount of usage that the UPS is being supplied, and how much energy is being supplied through it for our backup time period. We even look at the incoming power to see what the condition of our incoming power is. Therefore, we are using it more as a tool to monitor feeding power, not just the power that of what it's feeding. We use it to see how we're balancing our loads across circuits, because we're using 240 UPSs. Thus, we are trying to balance the loads when splitting the power down to 120 volt circuits, keeping it balanced across the legs of the power.

We run dual battery bank systems. Therefore, if we are doing maintenance on one side, then we can maintain the other side and still have the battery backed up. In our data center, we have redundancy in all of our racks. When UPS feeds one half of the rack, the other feeds the other half of the rack. We have dual power supplies to everything. We have a lot of redundancies because of that. Luckily, with Eaton dual Battery Cabinets, we can maintain the systems at all times (short of a transformer issue), even while we're doing the maintenance on them. Our IT department loves this, because we don't shut them down at all.

The battery life of the older batteries is the only thing that has been our issue up to this point. Luckily, the Cellwatch system that is on there identifies it and notifies us ahead of time when we should get them changed pretty quickly. This may be addressed with the lithium-ion batteries, but it is too early in our ownership of a UPS with a lithium-ion battery to know.

The UPSs are very stable. 

It has prevented us from having downtime because we have UPSs to get us through blinks and power outages. It prevented us from having downtime with all of our medical record systems and other data systems, which would include our telephone system since it is voice over IP. If we didn't have UPS in place during a downtime incident, it would have crippled our organization pretty quickly. We would have had to go to our downtime procedures, which would have slowed everything down. Most of our clinic visits and other outpatient functions would have been shutdown because they would not have had access to all the electronic medical files. Based on our downtime procedures, for every hour down, it usually takes around three days worth of time to recoup the backlog of information and get it back into the system. Eaton UPSs have saved us a lot of potential headaches.

Scalability has been pretty good. We were able to increase the battery. We only installed one battery cabinet, then we added a second one for additional capacity later on. That was a nice feature that others haven't been able to do.

As of right now, we don't plans to purchase additional UPSs. However, that can change in the company depending on many factors. We have a Centralized UPS in all of our buildings.

We have used tech support from time to time. My supervisor has called them. I have not had any direct dealings with tech support.

The only other UPS solution that we were using was our GE UPS, which is still in place right now.

Blackmon Agency helped with the deployment. Our experience with them has been excellent. It's been a great relationship.

They typically have two technicians here when we deploy and hook it all up. Then, we have several of our folks who are our subcontractors there, just to make sure everything goes smoothly in the connections over there.

It is by far the best investment that we have made.

The UPSs are saving us approximately $50,000 a year.

It has been more of a cost of doing business and maintaining our systems. We use it more as an insurance policy to ensure that our medical records stay up and running. The loss of revenue would have a bigger impact to our organization if our systems were not up and operating. An outage over a 24-hour period could easily be in the $300,000 range, which would be pretty substantial. We are a three million square foot hospital with 380 beds, so it would impact us quickly.

We have a service plan through Eaton. A local vendor, Blackmon Agency, who is a third-party, helps manage it for us. I don't get into it everyday. Our supervisor manages it with the local reps. I just helped orchestrate their initial agreement, then they have managed it since then.

The design of GE system was the biggest difference, specifically the maintenance bypass system. The way it was designed was very poor. In order to take the UPS off the system to do the main work for anything on it, you still have to have a blink on all your systems in order to do that. Whereas, the Eaton UPS has an ability to not blink, even though you bring it offline.

With the Eaton UPS, we are able to do the service work and not have to maintain them, but yet we can keep the systems up and operational. However, with the GE system, that was our first UPS that we put in. We realized quickly that we can't maintain them and keep the systems up and operating. We've had to do some other modifications just to be able to do maintenance to that unit.

I would strongly encourage you to evaluate the Eaton UPS just because of its reliability and ease of maintenance. It has been very reliable for us. The relationship and reliability of the unit made it a great purchase and selection for us. The service has been great too.

The unit's footprint is a bit larger than some of the others, but it is nothing that we haven't been able to manage. Most of the areas that we have installed them have been in new areas which have been renovated. We just designed around that size footprint and filled it, building the room to allow for the size of a footprint. Because of the footprint and cabinets sizes, it seems to be easier to maintain, even though it is a slightly larger footprint, as they are a GE unit. It is also easier to maintain because the cabinets are designed differently.

Only one of the units has lithium-ion batteries, the others currently do not. However, they are looking at changing this when our battery replacements come due. We will be replacing the GE product with an Eaton that has a lithium-ion battery.

It is for data center support to keep our equipment powered up. It is for backup power.

It is a redundant UPS. We have an A and B for power.

We have not had any outages or downtime using this UPS. It has kept us from having any outages.

It lets us know about any issues with the power. It is very sensitive to any surges or sags in power. We receive those messages and know when they are happening.

I would like to see there is a little more clarity on what the issue is on the notifications that we receive. This would make it easier for us. What we have to do now is sometimes go to the UPS to figure out exactly what the issue is, because it's not always clear.

It is a quality product. As far as I know, we have had no failures that I can think of. It has been very stable and reliable.

Some of the models are much more scalable. Our module has an option where I can add a module to it, so it is pretty flexible.

We currently have two Eaton UPSs on two different floors. One is a Powerware product, then Eaton purchased Powerware. We don't have any plans to purchase another right now, as there isn't a need.

When I think about who I have used, technical support has been very good. We talked at different times about battery replacement and some of the reports. I got clarity on what reports would say, for example.

The service side is very good at what they do, and because of that, we have had no issues.

We previously used GE. We switched to Eaton because we didn't have the best experience with GE. We had issues with their equipment, such as a failure.

It was simple to get it installed. We had it up and online quickly. It didn't take us very long to get it up and running. The process was seamless and easy to do.

We used Eaton's consultant for the deployment. My electrician worked directly with them.

For deployment and maintenance, there is usually one technician who we have come onsite. Then, there is just a computer operator in my group who gets them access to it.

It saves our company money. Because if there is an outage, it is approximately $1 million a minute for an outage. Since we are a very large credit union, outages would be very expensive for us.

I have a maintenance contract with Eaton, which has been very good. The notifications that we receive, we use email to my team, and they work well. 

We also evaluated Liebert, Schneider, and APC.

Liebert was a good alternative. Back when I started my career, we had a Liebert UPS in one of our data centers. It was very reliable. They were definitely a consideration. 

Part of what we looked at was Eaton service models in the area where we are located. They had plenty of technicians available. The product is made here in this area, so parts are readily available. 

There were quite a few reasons that we leaned toward Eaton, and it also had good recommendations from others.

Take a good hard look at it. I don't think you will find another UPS that is more reliable than theirs.

I have been very happy with it. It is an improvement over the other UPS that we use. I like what they have brought to us for a solution.

It's about average size compared to others. It might be a bit smaller, but it's about what I would expect, size-wise.

We have two of the 9395s and eight of the 9315s. They support our data center and the call center. We have them in place to ride through any power blips or outages. They're part of the critical systems for the business. The UPSs have to be in place and keep our data center running and call center running without any kind of interruption.

They have saved our organization from downtime. At one point we lost both utility feeds and the UPSs rode us through until the generators kicked on. We then ran on generator for 30 minutes and, after 30 minutes, the power came back. The UPS was only active for seven seconds. It had to maintain power in the data center until the generators came on. But if we didn't have the UPSs in place, we would have lost power to the data center and that would have shut our business down. We can't do business without our data center. Although it can get back up and working fairly quickly, it would still impact customers for days.

I don't know how much money having the UPSs saved, but I would say it was a substantial amount.

The most valuable feature is that they don't go down. We haven't had any other UPSs in this location, but we've had Chloride UPSs at other places and they didn't do so well.

The touchscreen functionality, being able to go to the UPS and look at readings, etc., is pretty intuitive. It's user-friendly. It's useful to know where you're at.

In terms of the unit's footprint, it fits well, considering its functions.

We also use the UPS Service Plan. We have a contract with them for that. It's very good. We use it all the time. We have to do PMs (preventive maintenance) on the UPSs throughout the year, as well as on the batteries. We've got enough units that they'll bring an extra tech in. I, myself, don't do anything with them, other than monitor them onsite. They are pretty much a fixture, like a piece of the building. They're in, they run, they do their thing. And if we get an alarm we call a tech and he comes out and he takes care of it.

We haven't had any issues with stability.

The scalability is good. With the 9395s you can buy extra pieces that connect up to the UPS which will expand the capacity of the UPS. Then you have to buy extra batteries. But you can scale it from 250 all the way up to 1.1 megawatts.

When we call a ticket in, we usually get somebody out here within an hour or two. In general, their tech support is really good.

We have had to contact them for issues. One time, a feedback breaker in a system-bypass module, or something like that, was tripped. We brought them in to see what caused it. They figured it out and we haven't had an issue like that again since.

We were using an older style, the 9315s from Eaton. But we've always been using Eaton UPSs for backup power.

We have to bring an Eaton tech out to do the initial setup. It's a specialized piece of equipment with proprietary information, programming, and all of that. You've got to make sure that all the parameters are right, so it's not something you can just do yourself.

Once it gets powered up and everything's wired up, it takes about an hour. There are no preparations that we need to do on our end before they implement.

Once they're up and running we need one person to maintain all the UPSs.

I don't know how to put a number to ROI, because I don't know, if we went down, how that would impact the business from a cost perspective.

The Service Plan we have is on a three-year contract.

We looked at Liebert, but we liked the Eaton better. They were comparable when it comes to cost. The difference was efficiencies.

If you absolutely do not want to lose power to your computers, your data center, or any piece of your business - if your business has to be running 100 percent of the time - you have to have a UPS in place and a generator. For us, it's just a part of the process of keeping the data center up. It's a piece of equipment that does a specific job so that we don't see any kind of power hiccups or outages.

We don't have any issues with the Eaton UPSs, they do really well. We seem to be pleased with everything, the way they're functioning now.

The UPSs back up our critical IT infrastructure. And PredictPulse allows us to manage and reduce downtime of the UPSs. PredictPulse monitors the UPS. It's a cloud service. 

We had an air conditioning problem, and we had no monitoring on that equipment. The PredictPulse alerted us that the room was too hot and we were able to solve the problem before it damaged our UPS. It saved our company from having downtime. The UPS has also saved us money, although I know what those numbers would be.

The monthly reporting is one of the most valuable features. It gives us an overview of the last month of its operation and we can see trends that are showing improvements or where availability and performance are decreasing. 

The visibility the PredictPulse service provides into our UPS equipment through the reporting is very good. It gives us very high visibility. We can go into the card and look at every parameter, all the settings, all the values. There are several tabs we can look at. We get a very good understanding of what the unit is doing, all remotely. It's very good.

I like the UPS touch-screen functionality as well. It's good.

The stability of the UPS is very good. There have been no issues.

The scalability is comparable. You can go very small or very big, so it's very good.

Eaton's technical support is good. When we call them, they're knowledgeable. They listen to our questions, they walk us through the steps to go through the process to fix it ourselves. And if not, then they pass it on to have someone come out or to someone else to call us back.

We have different vendors for UPS. We have three or four. But Eaton is our standard, currently, because of the reliability and the reputation of the company and the product.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's very step-oriented. You just follow along; it's a simple process to follow.

Deployment of the product is typical. It's usually a six-week lead-time, which is typical of most equipment. It's not good, but it's just what is expected in the industry.

Our path is to use them in new buildings and new remodels.

We usually use our own mechanical engineer consultant. Eaton is our preferred vendor. Our engineer chooses the product based on our standards and then works with the project team from our company.

For deployment, we usually require one technician from Eaton and our own engineer.

We have seen ROI by going with Eaton, but I don't know what the numbers would be.

We evaluated Schneider and Liebert. 

My advice would be to have a good consultant who understands your power needs and the amount of downtime that is acceptable.

The biggest lesson we've learned from using Eaton products is their reliability. It's there when you need it.

I don't have a problem with the footprint of the UPS units. They're big, but they have a lot of stuff. They are pretty versatile. You can put them close to things. They're good.