CyberPower CP1500PFCRM1U PFC Sinewave UPS Battery Backup and Surge Protector, 1500VA/900W, 6 Outlets, AVR, 1U Rackmount; UL Certified

I purchased this unit for my Mid-2011 27" iMac / 2.7GHz i5 Quad-Core / 1 TB Hard Drive / 16 GB RAM (Self Upgraded) / 512 MB Video/Graphics.The main reason I purchased this unit is, well, because in my opinion, if you have a desktop computer you absolutely NEED some sort of battery back-up unit, because power failures/outages WILL happen. Not to mention, brown-outs, where the voltage drops to an unusable level. The only time I would really say that you don't absolutely need a battery back-up is if you have a laptop, as they have built in batteries obviously, which will prevent it from doing a hard destructive shut-down with loss of power. Though if it were me, I would still purchase a battery back-up, because most of them feature AVR (automatic voltage regulation), which levels out the power output without having to resort to using the battery's power supply. For example, if you have a high load being drawn on that circuit, or for some reason your voltage drops some (not too much of course), this unit (and some others) will compensate for that and give you a more constant amount of voltage. In my area, here in Florida it's pretty common to have outages, especially during storms and such. The most common outage is a very quick 1-2 second outage, and then the power will come back on. Which isn't great at all, it actually sucks, very much.I had JUST purchased my iMac and I was shopping around for Back-UPS units, when my house had a quick outage, and my brand new 27" iMac did a hard shut down. Which gave me sort of a kick in the pants and coaxed me to purchase one VERY soon and ship it VERY fast. I was considering the APC Smart-UPS units, but they were outrageously expensive. Yes I realize that you pay for what you get, in some cases, but I just didn't want to spend $500-$600 on a battery back up. I absolutely needed a unit that provided Pure Sine Wave power when on battery power, because the newer iMacs all have PFC (Power Factor Corrected, I believe that's what the abbreviation stands for) Power Supply, and your average Back-UPS units like the APC models that you find at Staples, Office Depot and Wal-Mart absolutely will not work with computers that have these power supplies. This is because those Back-UPS units provide a "Stepped Approximation to a Sine Wave" when they are running on battery power", and newer computers, both Macs and PCs, with the PFC Power Supplies will NOT run them when it's running on battery power.I was debating on whether or not to purchase one of these CyberPower units, because I've seen a couple bad reviews on them, but a very large majority of the reviews were in fact very positive and the people had nothing but good words to write about these units. I think a majority of the issues come from the items being mishandled during the shipping process. I witnessed this when the customer service lady at UPS basically body slammed my Back-Ups unit onto the table right in front of me as I was picking up packages. They really don't care, because you could see what the item was, as it was shipped in the manufacturer's product packaging. Which is absolutely fine so long as someone doesn't use it to kick a field goal, as the manufacturers product packaging box is double walled cardboard, with a very generous amount of foam and extra cardboard spacing inside. Even with the super body slam, my unit worked absolutely wonderfully, no fan noise or anything.The build quality of these units isn't QUITE as great as the APC tower type units that you'll find at Staples and such, the outer skin on the CyberPower tower units is slightly thinner than the APC units, though it's still sturdy and not at all flexible or pliable. Everything else is absolutely wonderfully built. If you shake it there are no rattles, when you press on various body panels on it, none of them are loose or incorrectly fitted, receptacles are nice, and everything is great. Menu/interface functionality is great, easy to navigate and very intuitive. The buttons are solid when pressed also.One very large advantage that this unit has over it's non Pure Sine Wave APC counterparts that you'll find in stores is that these units are SMALL. Nice, small, and compact. I would say about half the size of those APC tower units. Making it possible to place it on your desk if you would like, next to your computer tower (if your computer has one) or somewhere else on the floor. It will not take up much room at ALL. It will maybe take up as much room as a single size 11 shoe will, that's it.The performance of this unit is great. I witnessed a couple times where the power dropped some and this unit properly compensated for it without having to kick over to battery power. There were quite a few times where household power was lost all together and this unit provided a perfect, instant, flawless transition to battery power and if it weren't for the click from the unit and the light sound of the fan kicking on, you wouldn't know it switched to battery power. Unless of course your computer notifies you when you are running on battery back-up, which my iMac did. I had my unit set on the highest sensitivity, and it was perfect. Sometimes with other units you will have an issue with the units being far too sensitive to have it on high sensitivity and really protect your computer and fast, and you will constantly hear the unit turning on and turning off, which was the case with the APC non-Sine Wave unit I purchased from Staples a couple years ago for another computer, and I had to leave that one set to medium sensitivity.The unit comes with software that you can use to set up automatic shut downs via different determinations such as the amount of time your computer is running on battery back up, how much charge the battery has left, and other parameters. THOUGH, and this is very important! With newer Macs, you absolutely do NOT need to install this provided software, or use any other kind of third part software. This is because you can go into System Preferences, and into Energy Saver, and once you have the Back-UPS unit connected to your Mac via the USB cable, your Energy Saver settings will automatically give you options to set up the Back-UPS unit and set up automatic proper shut downs by different parameters, like battery charge left, time running on battery and such. So these CyberPower units REALLY integrate very well with Macs, which is a very large plus.Bottom line is, if you are looking for a very nice Back-UPS unit for your computer that has a PFC Power Supply, and you don't want to spend $500 or more, then you really MUST look into this unit. It is absolutely amazing, and the price is amazingly ridiculously amazing (if that makes any sense, lol). CyberPower also has higher watt rated models, up to 2000VA I believe, my unit was a 1000VA, which is like 600w or such, and when it switched to battery power, it would give me a run time of 34 minutes, which is great, considering I was running quite a few programs and such at the time. So if you have a similar set up, you will have no problem getting adequate time to properly do everything you need with this model. If you have a much higher end gaming computer or such, I would possibly go with the 1350VA, 1600VA or 2000VA model. I am about to order a new Late-2012 27" iMac (the new thin models) with the i7 Quad-Core / 3 TB HDD / 8 GB RAM (I'll be upgrading it to 32GB myself, which you can't do with the 21.5" models, oddly enough) and 1 GB Video/Graphics, and for this one I plan on purchasing the 2000VA model, which will do me just fine.ALSO, ANOTHER VERY IMPORTANT WARNING. If you have a laser printer, or anything else that has a very high current draw, DO NOT, I repeat do NOT plug the printer into the battery back-up provided side of the unit. Plug it into the Surge Protected Only side, or better yet, a completely separate surge protector strip, which is what I did. Because when you turn on the laser printer, or start printing, you will see the voltage drop on the display of you Back-UPS unit quite a bit.

I have been using CyberPower UPSs for at least 25 years. I have 7 in use at the moment, ranging from 200 to 1000 VA. Some backup my internet, security camera, satellite TV system and the main TV while others backup three computers and ham radio equipment ALL work as they should. Now to address this CP1000PFCLCD PFC Sinewave UPS :When I buy from Amazon I first look at how many reviews there are for product w/in a certain category, figuring the more reviews the more people buy that particular brand or model (12,000+ on CyberPower is impressive. I then look at the 1 star reviews to see what people don't like and the % of 1 star. If that % is high, I stay away. If low I try to see if there may be a real problem, if the item is being used for the wrong intent, not appropriate for the application or if someone is just a complainer. With the very low % of 1 star and high % of 5 star I felt confident in continuing with the CyberPower brand...I needed to replace a 12 yo 600 VA CyberPower that failed, given what I've put it through I'd fail too.I am thoroughly satisfied with this unit but I feel compelled to address some of the general complaints made by some of the 1 star raters....might help others in decision making. I saw a complaint that this unit doesn't stay on battery power long enough (run time) for his server with 6 PC to shut down. True, this is a UPS designed for home & personal use, not for a data center (if a person has a 6 PC server that IS a data center). Another commented that it doesn't stay up long enough to shut down his PCs running Virtual Machines as they can take more than 6 minutes to shut down. He choose this line of CyberPower because they are "cheap" compared to commercial grade UPSs. Again, that person is expecting a "home" unit to perform as commercial UPS costing 10x as much. Wrong application.A common misconception about UPSs is what they can electrically support. Suppose you have two UPSs one rated at 400 VA and another at 1000 VA and you have a 300 VA load on them. The misconception is that the 1000VA unit will run your 300VA load 2.5 times longer than the 400VA unit will. Wrong. Either will run the load until the battery is depleted. A typical 400 VA UPS has one 12V battery, this CP1000PFCLCD PFC Sinewave UPS also has ONE battery. The length of time any UPS can carry the load is dependent on the battery capacity, not the UPS VA / watt rating.In another 1 star rating the person complained that this unit which has a 500 watt load on it begins shutting down his system almost immediately at a power failure. Of course. It's simple math. 500 watts at 120 VAC = 4.16 amps . Since the 12V battery has to supply that 500 watts the DC current will need to be 41.6 amps (41.6A x 12V ~= 500 watts). First, the single 9 AH battery in this unit can't supply ~42 Amps. Second, the specs for this unit show the battery at full load is good for about 0.5 min, in the real world I think that is a generous rating.So, why would you get a 600 watt 1000VA UPS if it can't handle that much load on battery? The answer is for longevity. If you have a 300 VA load on a 400 VA rated UPS it will be working at 75% of it's capacity (as an AVR it is working even on commercial power) while with a 1000VA rated unit that same 300VA would be only 33% of capacity, it doesn't work as hard therefore should last longer. Similar as having two identical cars except for the engine, An under powered 4 cyl may be working at near full capacity driving down the highway at 75 MPH likely won't last as long as comfortably powered 6 cyl because the 6 isn't working as hard.There are two possible solutions to the short shut down time, 1) buy a commercial UPS designed for the expected load / run time. 2) Replace the low capacity internal AGM battery with a same size LiFePo4 battery, it more than doubles the runtime. Some say that can't be done....I've been doing it with great success for a long time. 3) Replace the internal battery with a higher capacity external battery. It is easy (given skill sets) to fabricate a wire harness to plug into the internal battery wires and run to an external battery. Going from a 9 AH internal AGM battery (which technically can deliver only 4.5 AH) to an external 20 AH LiFePo4 battery, which will deliver 20 AH, will extend the run time about 5x. The down side is when the LFP battery is 95% depleted it will go from full rated 12V to 10 V cut off in just seconds. Therefore under a full load condition on the UPS, you must initiate shut down as soon as there is a power failure (set the battery run to 0 in the software). At full load that would provide over 2 min to complete shut down (or hibernation) vs under 30 seconds. Would CyberPower approve of this? No. Would it void the warranty? Yes. Does it work? Very well. In my lighter load situation the AGM internal battery provides 8 minutes of run time. Replacing it with an internal LFP increases the run time to 32 min, enough to finish what I'm working on, save data & manually initiate hibernation.

The UPS works pretty well, and the having display is nice to predict the time remaining. I've had a few power outages and the UPS worked perfectly without any issues.Be aware that if you have a power hungry PC (like one with a RTX XX90 card, you will not be able to use the UPS for very long at all - those cards are just insanely power hungry) you'll only get a few minutes to shut things off safely. However, if you have a low power draw, you may be able to power things for over 2 hours! With about 30 watts being drawn, the estimated time to depletion is 135 minutes.Tip: Device like laptops with good batteries (that still hold a charge) can be plugged into the surge-protection-only ports, to reduce power draw and make the UPS battery last longer.There are plenty of ports, but the ports are spaced a bit too close together for some devices with huge power supply blocks. That's not really a problem with the UPS though. (It's more of just having a bad design for those bulky power supplies).The display works well and automatically turns off, but pushing a button turns the display back on. The display tilts outward from the bottom a little bit for better readability when the UPS is sitting on the ground.There's a power indicator LED on the power button, and it's fairly bright (which might bother you if you place it near your bed).You can download software from their website to tweak the settings on the UPS, and it does work on Linux! :)The batteries are user replaceable, as long as you can find replacements (and your UPS still functions)... you can still use your UPS.