Backup UPS Sense/Config

[Rick]

After a slight PSU issue and some better code writing by me my reef
angel has been doing great for several months now. However today a new
issue came up.

Last night I lost power around 9:45 PM. It is still out and not
expected to be back up till midnight tonight. Fortunaly I have a
generator I can run enough off of to get by. However it got me
thinking.

Last night I was home when it went off. I have a small 350w UPS on the
reef to cover the power blinks and short outages. When I realized it
was an extended one last night I added a second UPS inline to give it
more juice. That lasted most of the night. I manually unplugged the
wavemaker to reduce power consumption.

It would be great though if there was a way the reef angel could sense
the power outage (maybe with an APC interface or similar) and cut down
to a protected state to minimize power consumption. Anyone got an idea
how?

[Roberto Imai]

Hi Rick,

You can accomplish this by using one of the ATO inputs.
Simply use a regular wall wart power supply, with output of less than 5VDC connected to the wall and bypassing the UPS.
When blackout occurs, you have this power supply going down and RA still running on the UPS.
Then all you have to do is keep monitoring that input. In case you see 0VDC on that input, you know there was a power outage and then react within the code to disable the ports you want.
Was this explanation clear enough?

Roberto.

[Rick]

Yeah, that makes sense. I will have to play around with the code a
little but I get the idea.