UPS in Nest Room

A bit off topic. Looking for opinions on installing a large UPS (50KVA) in a nest room. Any problems with noise induced on signal wires? Interference with PLC's? I'm thinking not, but it seem great care has been taken in the past to keep the electrical equipment out of these areas. As alway any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Cool link. Does anyone know if there are different fire codes for Nest rooms vs electrical?

PMFJI but what is a "nest" room

TheWaterboy said:

PMFJI but what is a "nest" room

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Same here. I was able to google PMFJI, but "nest room" sent me after wild geese.

I'm gonna take a stab at either "Control Room" or "Break Room".

I've heard both of these called many things, but never "nest room"

Nest room is a term we use to describe the room where the controls & wiring terminations reside. In our case its the rooms where we have our Foxboro IA systems. Seems great care was taken in the early designs to keep the electrcial equipmnet out of these areas. From a perfect world standpoint it makes sense to keep them seperate, but in the real world where I have limited space I keep getting increasing pressure to put Electrical equipment in these rooms.

I can see that. Been in a few of those rooms that do resemble multicolored bird nests.

I would expect that since most of these rooms only admit authorized personnel, the safety requirements would probably be limited to training the technicians about the stored energy and how to isolate it when necessary.

There may be concerns about ventilation since charging batteries generate hydrogen gas, but most of the large UPS I have worked with have sealed batteries and were in well ventilated rooms.

I never knew one to generate enough noise to cause problems with PLC power supplies, but ours were producing 120vac which would then get filtered by the PLC power supplies that were connected to them. I would be a bit concerned about the thing getting forgotten, beeping for no one to hear for a few minutes or hours, then falling on its face. Then everything hooked up to it goes dead all at once. This happened at a previous employer once, but we did not service it ourselves, there was a bypass mechanism to get the plant running while the UPS was down, and we had the contracted service company in there right away to take care of it.

I agree, don't think noise is an issue, and not worried about hydrogen as we do use sealed batteries. I think the bigger picture is the Fire protection. Did some web searches and found most electrcial fires in IT rooms / nest rooms are due to the power distribution. Typically in electrcial room we do not have wet sprinkler systems. Haylon or it current day replacement or a super duper fire detection system. Nest rooms it seems we have a mixed bag of fire protection schemes. Seems in some cases we looked at protecting the equipment with waterless systems and other places we are just trying to keep the building from burning down and don't really care if the equipment gets damaged. So my quest for guidance is on going and I appreciate every ones comments.

Ahh, Nest as in Rats Nest I get it now.
I have to add that if there was ever a bad place to put a device that could generate electrical interference, be it through RF or powerline harmonics, the central place for signal interconnection would be that place.

The debate is ongoing. Read several articles on the web where either place is OK. When you look at the definition of an electrical room.. design to properly house electrcial equipment it seem straigh forward the UPS goes into the electrial room... but it also said it can be located near the equipment being serviced by the UPS?

FWIW... we have a 150KVA UPS installed in our PLC/nest room. The PLC controls mission-critical equipment, and a lot of it, so their thinking was that they really wanted to keep this stuff running no matter what; 6 sealed battery cabinets and it is also generator-backed. We are required to do a power transfer test for each new customer 3-4 times a year) and never had any issues with inverter noise in close proximity to the PLC, I/O and comm network racks.

Our nest room is directly across the hall from the main electrical room (480VAC MCCs) with similar construction.

I've seen done both way... Wondering why the nest room and not the electrical room? In looking at NEC 110.26 there are some consideration for electrical equipment around sprinkler systems. In our electrical rooms we don't use sprinklers for fire protection. We are also concerned about the access to the equipment. Nest rooms are typically unlocked where as electrical rooms typically resitricted to qualified folks. I can see the pro's and con's of each location and finding it difficult to quantify which location is better.

As a follow up we had several meetings where we listed the pro's and con's of each location and in this case the electric room was the prefered location. Most of the pro's and con's were a wash. i think we had two factors that lead us the the electric room.

1. The classification of the UPS as electrical equipment. It made sense to put in a room designed for electrical equipment ie no wet fire system.

2. We also looked at the fire hazard the UPS posed...even thought it was silight almost a zero, there was a slight risk of the UPS causing a fire. Agian very very slight chance but not zero.

Are we correct? Who knows? I think we did our homework, time will tell. Wanted to share this as I hope it may help others.