UPS power for Direct Logic 205

THBW

Member
Join Date
Aug 2018
Location
Colorado
Posts
4
Hello All,
I inherited a small PLC panel which controls two high pressure pumps when I started as an operator for a small water supplier. I knew very little of PLC. Having come partially through a short but steep curve of the school of hard knocks I now am looking for UPS for this setup. The installation is on the side of a mountain and has regular power blinks. There are two Gensets as backup power but as you all know, the blink even from utilities to generator is hard on this stuff. I just need some experienced advice on what type/sizes of UPS power would work here. I do not want to just hack in a computer backup unit. Thanks
 
How much power is required and for how long? What sort of space and mounting provisions or limits do you have? I use both din rail mount units and also 19" rack mount units that i mount to the door of the cabinet.
 
I do not want to just hack in a computer backup unit. Thanks

This is what I have done simply for practical reasons, since a high end industrial UPS is expensive and bulky.

I recently built a pair of well control panels for a water system to match what was already in use and used the same $75 cheap APC UPS they were already using at other sites, but at least I was able to make the panel layout better suited to fit it and hang it on a pair of screws so it looks nice and won't slide around. Those were also using the DL250 PLC (AC powered base).

I had to meet a spec that called for a DIN rail mounted ups and found them from Sola. I was not impressed at all with their performance, but they look nice. I think the wally-world APC ups outperforms the sola in the realm of backup capacity. I think one of them I tested only kept a PLC and small amount of DC I/O working for about 15 minutes on backup.

http://www.galco.com/buy/Sola/SDU50...mYSFLm2WBMxkalc5cv6zkE5oqBRYWkpBoC2awQAvD_BwE

If you can power all your gear on 24vdc, I highly recommend the Puls UB10.241 along with a 100Ah sealed lead acid battery. We use this arrangement for RTUs especially on water towers where all you need to keep running is a pressure sensor and radio modem. I had one of them powering a booster pump station PLC, HMI, Micrologix1400 and handful of sensors and it kept the thing running for a week with the main control breaker turned off.

http://www.pulspower.com/us/products/show/product/detail/ub10241/

We put the battery in a marine battery box on the floor with flexible conduit to protect the wires from mice. Any water system operator can maintain a 12volt battery much easier than they can a UPS with specialized batteries, and the Puls controller does a good job of managing battery charge.

Of course you can't run a 3 phase motor with it, so it is less useful on a pump station, but very useful for water towers when there is an outage like from storm damage or ice storms that might keep the utility supply off for days.
 
Last edited:
About 10 years ago, an APC manager gave me a strong reprimand telling me not to use their computer UPS in industrial applications, he said they were not suitable for that.

We stop using them.
 
All the PLC's I have running off a UPS I just upsized the UPS the HMI computer would need and use that. I have never had a problem.

I think the 'not suitable for that' is that they don't want to be part of a lawsuit if something happens when their UPS is powering an industrial machine.
 
I think one of them I tested only kept a PLC and small amount of DC I/O working for about 15 minutes on backup.

This is really all I need. The two pumps run on VFD (Separate) so all I need to keep alive is the CPU and I/O. There has been enough hacking in this plant, don't need anymore. :) I have a picture of what I need to keep alive in the seconds between power failure and generator coming online.
 
About 10 years ago, an APC manager gave me a strong reprimand telling me not to use their computer UPS in industrial applications, he said they were not suitable for that.

We stop using them.

That makes no sense. We use APC on a lot of devices including suggestions and help with product selection from local reps. Environment where the units are housed is way more important than what’s plugged into the units. Industrial devices are usually suited to withstand degraded power better than consumer or IT goods, so if their UPS can’t supply the minimum then they are useless. We try to house our UPS equipment and PLC processors in the same environment as our servers, so no issues there. Field mounted stuff tends to be very difficult to find a nice balance.
 
Hello All,
I just need some experienced advice on what type/sizes of UPS power would work here. I do not want to just hack in a computer backup unit. Thanks

For cost, and if all your worried about is 24vdc, if you want an industrial unit that can clip to DIN rail, check out PULSpower.com

http://www.pulspower.com/us/products/product-lists/dc-ups-and-buffer-modules/

If you are looking for 120vac, and or a better quality and features (but not cost :) ) check out PhoenixContact.

You need to know what your load is, and if your only looking to keep the system up through a blip, you then don't have to beat yourself up over sizing.
 
Yes all I want is to keep just the bus up so it can wait the few seconds for the generator to come online. The power failures are so often that the poor thing is getting hammered to death. It has a button battery for memory retention in the CPU but that is all. For some reason I cannot get a picture uploaded so the base is Direct Logic 205 D2-09B, with two AC modules, one in and one out, and a DL250 CPU.
 

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