[labnetwork] UPS' in your facility

[N Shane Patrick]

Hello Joseph,

This is a question that we have recently been revisiting ourselves. There are several factors to consider such as the general stability of your power system, the sensitivity your tools have shown to poor quality power or brownouts/blackouts, the downtime created by such power events, the maintenance impact of such power events vs the maintenance and cost impacts of managing the UPSs, any restrictions or inventory requirement your institution may have on energy storage devices and their associated energy density and fire risks, etc.

At WNF we have a large flywheel system that protects most research equipment against short duration (a few seconds) power events, with a couple of systems having their own separate UPSs - notably our EBL system has a 50kVA total system backup and our SEM has a battery backup system that specifically keeps its ion pumps running, but nothing else. We have recently begun evaluating the need to protect certain other critical system, particularly after a recent blackout appears to have killed a custom integrated CPU system that is costing us $7k and significant lead time to replace.

So my answer is that it is prudent to evaluate each piece of equipment individually. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to most of this type equipment as the needs, benefits, and costs will vary. In our case, we were fortunate enough to include the flywheel system as part of a major remodel, and we are strongly considering additional protection for high value, high demand, and high impact systems. Given the power draw and general ease of recovery, I wouldn’t personally consider individual UPSs for things like roughing pumps. Other types of pumps might be reasonable, but you also need to consider the facilities side of the equation. If your pumps are connected to house facilities, like exhaust or cooling water, you will likely still shutdown the pumps due to protection modes when these services inevitably fail in a power outage. Almost no one has these types of facilities items backed up.

Good luck. Hopefully you don’t have too many system to think about as it can get messy.


N. Shane Patrick
Manager, Lab Operations and Safety
Electron Beam Lithography
Washington Nanofabrication Facility (WNF) 
National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI)
University of Washington - NanoES
Fluke Hall 129, Box 352143
(206) 221-1045
patricns at uw.edu <mailto:patricns at uw.edu>
http://www.wnf.washington.edu/ <http://www.wnf.washington.edu/>

> On May 29, 2023, at 11:13 AM, Joseph Losby <joseph.losby at ucalgary.ca> wrote:
> 
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> In the design of our facility, we are trying to gauge how others address uninterrupted power supply.  
> 
> We are considering having UPS' on our beam tools only.  Would you consider having them for your pumps and control computers as well?  What other tools do you have UPS' for?
> 
> Cheers and thanks for your replies,
> Joe
> 
> Joseph Losby, PhD
> Manager, qLab Operations
> 
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