I would be curious to see how LifePO4 power stations compare.

* These power stations are better than conventional (lead-acid battery) UPSs in the sense that they're cheaper, more flexible, have dramatically longer battery life, and require battery replacement less often.

* ...but I haven't seen any that claim to be "line-interactive" or even say specifically when they fail over (other than a total power cut). They do talk about how long it takes to fail over: older models are >20ms (long enough that your machine will probably reboot); many newer ones are <10ms. I'm not sure how high-quality their sine wave is when on battery.

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dylan604 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Can these LifePO4 batteries be safely drained to 0% and then charged numerous times?

	▲	mbesto 12 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes and no. 0% you should be fine, but generally speaking you'll get longer life out of LifePO4 if you stay between 10% and 80%. Most battery based PV systems are installed to shut off (or switch to grid) at the 10% SOC mark for this reason.
	▲	scottlamb an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes, thousands of times, an order of magnitude improvement over lead acid. And the increased capacity means that they're much less likely to hit 0% (or whatever defined cut-off you set) during a typical outage anyway.

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LeifCarrotson 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The capacitors in your PSU's rectifier have to float through 8.333ms interruptions every. single. cycle.

20 milliseconds is barely distinguishable from a single 60 Hz sine wave period. 10 milliseconds just over half a cycle.

	▲	Aurornis 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> The capacitors in your PSU's rectifier have to float through 8.333ms interruptions every. single. cycle. They do not. You must be thinking of very old power supply technology with a simple bridge rectifier in front of some capacitors. Switch mode power supplies with power factor correction spread the current draw across the cycle to keep the power factor high. They are drawing power from the line for most of the cycle. There is not a 8.3ms interruption. > 20 milliseconds is barely distinguishable from a single 60 Hz sine wave period. 10 milliseconds just over half a cycle The ATX 3.1 power supply standard only requires 12ms of hold up time.
	▲	scottlamb 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> 20 milliseconds is barely distinguishable from a single 60 Hz sine wave period. I've read that the newest PSUs are only guaranteed to last 12ms. Of course they may last much longer, especially if running near idle, but I'd prefer something that works well with any compliant device. Here's one source: "Measured in milliseconds, hold-up time indicates how long a PSU can sustain its output within specified voltage limits after a loss or drop in input power. ATX 3.1 features a shorter hold-up time of 12ms, compared to ATX 3.0's 17ms hold-up time. This results in a small improvement in the PSU's efficiency." https://www.corsair.com/us/en/explorer/diy-builder/power-sup... I haven't dug through the spec itself.