Measuring And Publishing UPS Efficiency - A Dark Art?

By Chloride North America

A quick desktop survey of published energy-efficiency data for UPS machines will result in a wide variation of figures - with as much as three percentage-points of difference between the ‘lowest' and the ‘highest' in any given segment of the market. However this apparent disparity is difficult to explain when one looks deeper into the base technology and discovers that the internal power-topology of competing machines are similar despite the difference in published efficiency. This paper explores the issue and reaches the conclusion that, in the absence of any independent testing and certification authority, it is far too easy for OEMs to resort to one-up-man-ship in the dark art of the data-sheet ‘game'.