Eaton UPS Reviews

We use Eaton UPS's in a variety of our data centers and for emergency operations in our city.

What we were looking for wasn't necessarily to address challenges we were facing but for something that would reliably supply backup power to us, when needed, at an affordable price.

We have one big UPS at each of our locations. The 9PX is at our Public Works, while at the Police Department we have a 9170, which is a large three-phase UPS. At City Hall we have another large UPS. At each location we have a solution that will give us runtime during a total power outage, of anywhere from 30 minutes to six hours.

For the desktops and remote switches, we have a lot of the 1000s and 1500s. 

There isn't any one particular feature that is most valuable. The fact that they're reliable and that they notify us whenever the line power drops are the only things we really need. All of our UPS's have been available and up whenever power outages have happened.

So far, the battery life, from my observation, seems better than average. It was one of the features that Eaton had described to us. They have a certain way of charging the batteries and keeping them charged so that they actually last longer.

The Eaton products themselves, and the sales and support, are excellent. However, when it comes to the power management software portion, that's the part that I haven't really seen or heard a lot about. The dashboards of the UPS's, or the management software, are one area that they could probably improve a little.

We have been using Eaton UPS's for close to five years. It was five years ago when we first got connected with Jim Nimi who introduced us to them. We tried out a couple of them before we switched one of our older UPS's out to the large Eaton 9PX.

So far, when it comes to performance and reliability, we've had virtually zero problems with the products. From our perspective, they've just been up and running and we haven't heard from them. They've supplied us with power when needed. So it's a win-win for us.

It grows with our needs. Almost all of the systems that we looked at had pretty robust scalability, and Eaton's sales staff were always very forward-thinking when recommending the replacement units.

We plan to increase usage of Eaton UPS's. We have two more large batteries that need to be replaced in the city. We will be working on one of them this fall, and the other in the spring.

I've only had to call their support twice and they have been excellent. They routed me to the correct person right away and they took care of my issues.

We had some aging units throughout the city. Some of them were 15-plus years old, and it was a matter of starting to replace them one at a time. About 80 percent of our units are now from Eaton. We've slowly converted almost the entire city to Eaton.

The purchasing experience and delivery were all excellent. They were very straightforward and easy to do. The actual installation was a little more complex.

The installation was a little bit different from the purchasing and delivery stages, only because I hadn't ever really been involved in replacing a UPS before. It seemed more cumbersome than I thought it would be. However, I didn't really have anything to compare it to. The difficulty seemed to come from having to hire a contractor to do the electrical work and prep, and then have him plug it in and set it up. Then, a person from Eaton had to actually come out and turn it on. That was the unusual part for me. I would have assumed that an Eaton person would have installed it and plugged it in. I'm not sure that reflects badly on Eaton. It's just the way things are done, but it was new to me.

In terms of our staff involved with the units, two technical services managers were the main ones who worked with Eaton, when spec'ing out the batteries.

I'm not so sure about a return on our investment. We got an affordable, decent price and we've gotten a good product out of it. But UPS's just sit there until they're needed. When line power has gone out, they've been there every time for us.

Before we chose Eaton, we evaluated other vendors, but we try to standardize. For us, it doesn't make sense to have two or three UPS vendors. Before we started replacing the old ones, we looked at APC and a couple of the other UPS vendors, along with Eaton. We thought that, for the overall product, Eaton supplied the best and we standardized on them.

Look at the price and availability, as well as the long-term durability of the batteries on the Eaton side. That's what they did for us.

We have two of the 9395s and eight of the 9315s. They support our data center and the call center. We have them in place to ride through any power blips or outages. They're part of the critical systems for the business. The UPSs have to be in place and keep our data center running and call center running without any kind of interruption.

They have saved our organization from downtime. At one point we lost both utility feeds and the UPSs rode us through until the generators kicked on. We then ran on generator for 30 minutes and, after 30 minutes, the power came back. The UPS was only active for seven seconds. It had to maintain power in the data center until the generators came on. But if we didn't have the UPSs in place, we would have lost power to the data center and that would have shut our business down. We can't do business without our data center. Although it can get back up and working fairly quickly, it would still impact customers for days.

I don't know how much money having the UPSs saved, but I would say it was a substantial amount.

The most valuable feature is that they don't go down. We haven't had any other UPSs in this location, but we've had Chloride UPSs at other places and they didn't do so well.

The touchscreen functionality, being able to go to the UPS and look at readings, etc., is pretty intuitive. It's user-friendly. It's useful to know where you're at.

In terms of the unit's footprint, it fits well, considering its functions.

We also use the UPS Service Plan. We have a contract with them for that. It's very good. We use it all the time. We have to do PMs (preventive maintenance) on the UPSs throughout the year, as well as on the batteries. We've got enough units that they'll bring an extra tech in. I, myself, don't do anything with them, other than monitor them onsite. They are pretty much a fixture, like a piece of the building. They're in, they run, they do their thing. And if we get an alarm we call a tech and he comes out and he takes care of it.

We haven't had any issues with stability.

The scalability is good. With the 9395s you can buy extra pieces that connect up to the UPS which will expand the capacity of the UPS. Then you have to buy extra batteries. But you can scale it from 250 all the way up to 1.1 megawatts.

When we call a ticket in, we usually get somebody out here within an hour or two. In general, their tech support is really good.

We have had to contact them for issues. One time, a feedback breaker in a system-bypass module, or something like that, was tripped. We brought them in to see what caused it. They figured it out and we haven't had an issue like that again since.

We were using an older style, the 9315s from Eaton. But we've always been using Eaton UPSs for backup power.

We have to bring an Eaton tech out to do the initial setup. It's a specialized piece of equipment with proprietary information, programming, and all of that. You've got to make sure that all the parameters are right, so it's not something you can just do yourself.

Once it gets powered up and everything's wired up, it takes about an hour. There are no preparations that we need to do on our end before they implement.

Once they're up and running we need one person to maintain all the UPSs.

I don't know how to put a number to ROI, because I don't know, if we went down, how that would impact the business from a cost perspective.

The Service Plan we have is on a three-year contract.

We looked at Liebert, but we liked the Eaton better. They were comparable when it comes to cost. The difference was efficiencies.

If you absolutely do not want to lose power to your computers, your data center, or any piece of your business - if your business has to be running 100 percent of the time - you have to have a UPS in place and a generator. For us, it's just a part of the process of keeping the data center up. It's a piece of equipment that does a specific job so that we don't see any kind of power hiccups or outages.

We don't have any issues with the Eaton UPSs, they do really well. We seem to be pleased with everything, the way they're functioning now.

The UPSs back up our critical IT infrastructure. And PredictPulse allows us to manage and reduce downtime of the UPSs. PredictPulse monitors the UPS. It's a cloud service. 

We had an air conditioning problem, and we had no monitoring on that equipment. The PredictPulse alerted us that the room was too hot and we were able to solve the problem before it damaged our UPS. It saved our company from having downtime. The UPS has also saved us money, although I know what those numbers would be.

The monthly reporting is one of the most valuable features. It gives us an overview of the last month of its operation and we can see trends that are showing improvements or where availability and performance are decreasing. 

The visibility the PredictPulse service provides into our UPS equipment through the reporting is very good. It gives us very high visibility. We can go into the card and look at every parameter, all the settings, all the values. There are several tabs we can look at. We get a very good understanding of what the unit is doing, all remotely. It's very good.

I like the UPS touch-screen functionality as well. It's good.

The stability of the UPS is very good. There have been no issues.

The scalability is comparable. You can go very small or very big, so it's very good.

Eaton's technical support is good. When we call them, they're knowledgeable. They listen to our questions, they walk us through the steps to go through the process to fix it ourselves. And if not, then they pass it on to have someone come out or to someone else to call us back.

We have different vendors for UPS. We have three or four. But Eaton is our standard, currently, because of the reliability and the reputation of the company and the product.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's very step-oriented. You just follow along; it's a simple process to follow.

Deployment of the product is typical. It's usually a six-week lead-time, which is typical of most equipment. It's not good, but it's just what is expected in the industry.

Our path is to use them in new buildings and new remodels.

We usually use our own mechanical engineer consultant. Eaton is our preferred vendor. Our engineer chooses the product based on our standards and then works with the project team from our company.

For deployment, we usually require one technician from Eaton and our own engineer.

We have seen ROI by going with Eaton, but I don't know what the numbers would be.

We evaluated Schneider and Liebert. 

My advice would be to have a good consultant who understands your power needs and the amount of downtime that is acceptable.

The biggest lesson we've learned from using Eaton products is their reliability. It's there when you need it.

I don't have a problem with the footprint of the UPS units. They're big, but they have a lot of stuff. They are pretty versatile. You can put them close to things. They're good.

We have unstable power in our area and we have a medical device called a Linear Accelerator that we use to deliver radiation to patients. The unstable power was disrupting our operations and the UPS has helped us out with that.

The most important aspect is the fact that it protects the power to the Linear Accelerator. It also cleans the power a little bit and, as a result, I believe our equipment has become more reliable. 

It has been working and has allowed us to have more uptime.

The battery life seems to be pretty good. I don't have a lot of experience with other units of its size, but it does a good job of keeping our unit up. There is no active power management. It just keeps the power up. We haven't had any power failures that are long enough to completely drain the battery. It's been good for small power failures.

In addition, I can access the built-in webpage on the UPS and use that to look at the status.

It's on all the time and monitoring. It gives us an email once a month telling us that our device is working properly. It will also list the power events that happened in that month.

I think the batteries are based on lead-acid technology so they have to be replaced every five years, but with the new lithium-ion battery technology that is available, it might be good if, at some point, they updated their battery technology.

We have been using Eaton PredictPulse for one year.

It seems to be pretty stable.

The technical support is pretty good. In general, I've been able to get somebody on the phone. There was one time that I wrote an email that didn't get a response. Overall, it has been okay. It's not five-star service, but I've generally been able to get somebody on the line.

Neutral

It was installed in a day, but it took a while for it to be delivered. We had to hire somebody to bring it into the room where it was going to be installed, and then we had to bring in electricians. The setup itself was relatively straightforward. The hands-on time was pretty quick, but in terms of logistics, it took several weeks. At the end, somebody came from Eaton to turn it on.

We bought it indirectly through Elekta, which is the manufacturer of our Linear Accelerator, so the buying process was reasonable. Elekta purchased it for us. We paid Elekta and Elekta paid Eaton.

Elekta did the project management. The implementation was a little bit rough. We didn't fully understand what was needed, but that wasn't Eaton's fault.

We don't do anything to maintain it. It's pretty self-sufficient. The initial deployment required two people on our side, but that was just for one day.

It's not like we have any additional revenue as a result of using the UPS but it does improve our reliability. There is a positive impact in terms of patient care, although it doesn't necessarily translate into additional dollars. We were having issues with our Linear Accelerator that have been stabilized. More uptime means we're providing better patient care.

Elekta recommended this UPS and they set it up. We didn't really shop around because this was their solution.

It's a good device.

It is for data center support to keep our equipment powered up. It is for backup power.

It is a redundant UPS. We have an A and B for power.

We have not had any outages or downtime using this UPS. It has kept us from having any outages.

It lets us know about any issues with the power. It is very sensitive to any surges or sags in power. We receive those messages and know when they are happening.

I would like to see there is a little more clarity on what the issue is on the notifications that we receive. This would make it easier for us. What we have to do now is sometimes go to the UPS to figure out exactly what the issue is, because it's not always clear.

It is a quality product. As far as I know, we have had no failures that I can think of. It has been very stable and reliable.

Some of the models are much more scalable. Our module has an option where I can add a module to it, so it is pretty flexible.

We currently have two Eaton UPSs on two different floors. One is a Powerware product, then Eaton purchased Powerware. We don't have any plans to purchase another right now, as there isn't a need.

When I think about who I have used, technical support has been very good. We talked at different times about battery replacement and some of the reports. I got clarity on what reports would say, for example.

The service side is very good at what they do, and because of that, we have had no issues.

We previously used GE. We switched to Eaton because we didn't have the best experience with GE. We had issues with their equipment, such as a failure.

It was simple to get it installed. We had it up and online quickly. It didn't take us very long to get it up and running. The process was seamless and easy to do.

We used Eaton's consultant for the deployment. My electrician worked directly with them.

For deployment and maintenance, there is usually one technician who we have come onsite. Then, there is just a computer operator in my group who gets them access to it.

It saves our company money. Because if there is an outage, it is approximately $1 million a minute for an outage. Since we are a very large credit union, outages would be very expensive for us.

I have a maintenance contract with Eaton, which has been very good. The notifications that we receive, we use email to my team, and they work well. 

We also evaluated Liebert, Schneider, and APC.

Liebert was a good alternative. Back when I started my career, we had a Liebert UPS in one of our data centers. It was very reliable. They were definitely a consideration. 

Part of what we looked at was Eaton service models in the area where we are located. They had plenty of technicians available. The product is made here in this area, so parts are readily available. 

There were quite a few reasons that we leaned toward Eaton, and it also had good recommendations from others.

Take a good hard look at it. I don't think you will find another UPS that is more reliable than theirs.

I have been very happy with it. It is an improvement over the other UPS that we use. I like what they have brought to us for a solution.

It's about average size compared to others. It might be a bit smaller, but it's about what I would expect, size-wise.

Eaton UPSs are primarily used in corporate data centers. It's the UPS before the generator starts.

We like the easy-to-read display screen and the web configuration where you can manage the unit.

The technology is reliable.

We haven't had any issues with it. We've been very happy with the units.

They could enhance their software, but overall, it's a good solution.

We have several versions of Eaton UPS deployed.

Eaton UPS is a stable product.

It is scalable. You can purchase units with a larger battery supply, which will give you more downtime. You can coordinate that and figure out how much battery time you need based on your risk level and the configuration of your generators.

The technical support is excellent.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward.

It is deployed and the units are maintained by an Eaton Professional, 

On our end, there is very little interaction from the end-user.

I don't have anything negative to say about this solution. 

In the time that we have had it, it has been an excellent product that's very reliable. We haven't had any problems with it. 

The support is really good. They offer quarterly support calls, which are very helpful.

It only does one thing, it gives you the power and all the information you need. There are not many features on there. It includes a power management feature. 

I don't see any features that will help me more than what is already there.

I would rate Eaton UPS a seven out of ten.