PowerVault: Dedicated home theater battery backup
posted Aug 27th 2007 7:29PM
How much would you spend not to miss a second of the Super Bowl or the Final's Game 7? $500 or maybe even up to $5000, but we're having a hard time justifying spending $25k to $30k to have a dedicated home theater battery backup. Then again, generators are loud and dirty, plus they take time to get up and running so a huge battery would be the best solution. That's where the PowerVault comes in. The 95-amp monster provides a dedicated power source for your entire home theater and when we say entire, think amps, projector, lighting and whatever else a theater nut has. The unit can work in conjunction with a generator or solar panel so when those kick in, the PowerVault shuts down. While we could drop $25k on a lot of other home theater gear, this battery backup might be just what you need to guarantee power for the big game. That is of course that your cable line wasn't affected when the power went out or the satellite dish still works during the storm; well, guess you could always pop in a movie and weather the storm that way.
That is for someone who is A: Rich B: Not aware of Battery back up units at Frys that could easily power a modest if not pretty advanced system long enough to properly shut down. Have fun spending 25gs!!!
-dad
I use an APC Back-UPS RS 1500 and it supports my 42" plasma, Tivo HD, Mac Mini, 5.1 surround system, and Xbox without a problem. The longest its ever needed to run was about 5 minutes and everything worked fine. I picked it up for maybe $150. I can't see any way to justify paying over 160x the price for this.
well, if you can afford to spend $25k on this then you'd probably want both satellite and cable just to make sure you dont miss anything.
http://www.apc.com/resource/include/techspec_index.cfm?base_sku=SYA16K16PXR&total_watts=500
This is the largest unit that I would compare to this device and that's LIST price. You can call a APC Gold Dealer and Dell and knock off a few grand from that and this device is networked... It will email you when status changes too. You probably only need half of that and scale up (you can get the SYA8K16P for about 6-7K will some price shopping and each battery module is less than 300.00 per), because it's a N+1 power supply and scable on the batteries including adding more cabinets. You could probably get this one for 12-14K easily and granted that's a lot, but you could buy two of these for this unit. The XR is the extended runtime cabinet, the SYA8K16P is a half height but these two units are rated for 100amp service and have to be hardwired with service entry cable, which is probably the same for this unit because of the amps.
I'd say that 12kVA is far more than I need, and that monstrosity is far bigger than I need it to be. I've done well with 500VA UPS systems.
ummmmmmmmmm
Why do this when you could buy around 4 STANDBY Generators for your ENTIRE HOUSE for the same price!?!?! and have more than just ya TV goin........ya know.......like a microwave to cook ya popcorn...
http://www.guardiangenerators.com/Products/Residential/Elite/AirCooled18kW.aspx
Because generators don't turn on instantly. A battery backup keeps your devices from the power turning off instantly, which can damage them.
Guardian 5KW natural gas automatic generators with switch boxes are less than 3k to your door. One of those will power your house.
So, then you just need a 5 second backup. Stick a 500VA backup on each device, and you're done.... permanently.
Plus, when the battery gives it up in one of your backups, you're out 50 bucks, not 25000 bucks.
I was explaining why you would need any sort of battery backup instead of just buying a ton of generators, but thanks.
At that price why not just get something to keep your whole house lit up?