Anyone ever use one of these? I took a chance and ordered one that will be here on Wednesday, as I need to replace one of my existing UPS units. That one will not output on the non battery plugs anymore and I just need the outlets. I picked up the 8 outlet Goldenmate, it's only $10 more than the 4 outlet one. Let me know if you have used one and I will post the results of the one I ordered when it gets here.
Goldenmate Lithium Backup Battery
- Thread starter Prospero
- Start date
Let us know how it is!
If you can find a way to open it I'd be curious to see a teardown (obviously don't take it apart if this is critical/just to satisfy the forum!). The transfer time spec is not great for the price I wouldn't be complaining, and it's short enough that equipment with a high-quality PSU should not be affected too.
It's something like 1/5th the cost the Vertiv 1500VA lithium units (and now like 1/7th the current retail price of the Vertiv's...). o_0
If you can find a way to open it I'd be curious to see a teardown (obviously don't take it apart if this is critical/just to satisfy the forum!). The transfer time spec is not great for the price I wouldn't be complaining, and it's short enough that equipment with a high-quality PSU should not be affected too.
It's something like 1/5th the cost the Vertiv 1500VA lithium units (and now like 1/7th the current retail price of the Vertiv's...). o_0
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Hard to imagine a quality UPS with a decent sized Lipo battery could be had for $200. But I'd be quite happy if this thing does perform well! Please let us know how it goes after you receive it. No way I'd use one in a commercial setting for critical loads, but at home? Hell yes.
About a year ago I bought one of these Vertiv units for home duty for my network gear. Pretty sure that Goldenmate has a bit more runtime though.
Edit: Now that I look at it more, you can get two of these 12V 10Ah Lipo batteries for $60 nowadays. You should be able to get a 1000VA UPS with the equivalent amount of Lipo battery for $200 these days.
About a year ago I bought one of these Vertiv units for home duty for my network gear. Pretty sure that Goldenmate has a bit more runtime though.
Edit: Now that I look at it more, you can get two of these 12V 10Ah Lipo batteries for $60 nowadays. You should be able to get a 1000VA UPS with the equivalent amount of Lipo battery for $200 these days.
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Lack of USB port for use with NUT is a disappointment. But interested to hear how it is otherwise, I have an assortment of kit (amounting to maybe 45W total draw) that something like this would be ideal for.
Reviews suggest sealed / non-user serviceable which means the manufacturer clearly sees this as a buy, use, dispose of device, which is also a bit disappointing. I know the batteries should last longer, doesn't mean I don't want to be able to replace them when they are EoL...
Reviews suggest sealed / non-user serviceable which means the manufacturer clearly sees this as a buy, use, dispose of device, which is also a bit disappointing. I know the batteries should last longer, doesn't mean I don't want to be able to replace them when they are EoL...
If the battery and UPS last at least 10 years, still a pretty damn good deal IMO. 'Course it would be nice if they at least had a refurbishment program for them rather than sending them to e-waste. Although just because it's not intended to be user serviceable doesn't mean it can't be. If @Prospero is prepared to crack open the case and peek at the innards...
Completely agree, I suppose I just object to things being designed to be chucked away. I'd certainly be interested to know how the OP gets on and what if anything they can show us of the insides.If the battery and UPS last at least 10 years, still a pretty damn good deal IMO. 'Course it would be nice if they at least had a refurbishment program for them rather than sending them to e-waste. Although just because it's not intended to be user serviceable doesn't mean it can't be. If @Prospero is prepared to crack open the case and peek at the innards...
I think there would be a wide market for a small box that provided a localised mains plug socket and had terminal hookups for something like this. Tell the box how many amp hours you're packing (so you can go parallel with multiple batteries if you want more run time) and off you go. An updated version of this, if you will
Not found a good review of it yet, but this youtube video(from ~7:30 if the link doesn't work) shows opening it and some of the internals:
View: https://youtu.be/YDWub2Ho034?t=454
Battery pack appears to be custom, but explains how they got 800W in such a relatively small package with LFP's(vs the more standard UPS form factor batteries).
The 20ms transfer time makes me think they're reusing a power station design, rather than a proper UPS. Fine for most uses, but I'd want to know how it acts with brownouts, spikes, etc. from the AC side or if it's only suitable for power cuts.
View: https://youtu.be/YDWub2Ho034?t=454
Battery pack appears to be custom, but explains how they got 800W in such a relatively small package with LFP's(vs the more standard UPS form factor batteries).
The 20ms transfer time makes me think they're reusing a power station design, rather than a proper UPS. Fine for most uses, but I'd want to know how it acts with brownouts, spikes, etc. from the AC side or if it's only suitable for power cuts.
This, plus a suitable battery would probably do the trick, but it is hilariously over-engineered for any kind of home internet backup purposes, and as teubbist mentions, it's not clear how it would deal with spikes, brownouts, etc. Transfer time is also "only" 20ms.
That actually seems like a pretty good "review" of it to me.
Definitely not a standard battery pack. Based on what I can see it probably wouldn't be practical to replace the battery, assuming the electronics outlived it. Based on the price I am assuming the electronics is probably not the highest quality and I suspect caps might start to die before the battery.
That would also partially explain how they're making this so much cheaper than "proper" UPSes, as even the most budget of standby UPSes have a transfer time around half that. But a lot of loads can handle that transfer time, as demonstrated in the video with his PC. I'm curious if the things I currently have on UPSes at home can handle it: router, switch, NAS, and PS5.
No ability to silence the godforsaken beeping is nearly a deal breaker, although I'd probably be amenable to opening the case and putting a stake through the heart of the
I want my UPS reviews to have oscilloscopes, dirty AC feeds, real transfer time tests, output limit testing(both off battery and pass through) with actual measurements, etc.
Still, it's one of the better reviews so far. And I'm hoping that this product makes enough noise that other UPS players will step in.
Oh so you want a hardcore review. Fair enough. I wonder if Daniel Sauvageau would do a commissioned piece.
Not sure I need to do a tear down with that review. Anyone still want me to open it?
Some not-shaky, less-fisheye shots would amuse me, but no real need. Definitely a neat product, but the performance efficiency of the charger circuit when I usually just want to run 12V networking gear still has me wanting a no-inverter style one. If you're really interested, I'd also be interested in knowing what the battery output voltage configuration is (13.2 nominal, 26.4?) when you pop the XT connector on the inside.
I'll probably get around to a new brick of Pb in the network pile one of these days, but have mostly solid power when it matters. It's great that this stuff is getting great on price, though.
I'll probably get around to a new brick of Pb in the network pile one of these days, but have mostly solid power when it matters. It's great that this stuff is getting great on price, though.
Got it in, but letting it charge overnight like I do all my UPS. Don't know if this one needs it or not, but it has always served me well in the past. I should have some review material for you tomorrow evening.
VIctron is solid high end, but you can probably find others that'll work just fine. Although that's a 230V, not 110V for us USians.
There is a 1200VA 12v inverter/charger 120V, and they also have a lot more of various types. Gets a bit confusing how many they have.
So far so good, I used up 7 out of 8 plugs on it, so more was working on my old UPS than I thought. It's handling the load just fine and I didn't find the beeping as I switched it over to be overly obnoxious or loud. Much quieter than something like an APC or Tripp Lite UPS. I also haven't heard the fan come on yet, but I don't have that big of a load on this one. It doesn't have a PC plugged into it, only peripherals and a switch. Over all I think it's going to work just fine for its current use. The big test will come when I replace one of the UPS that my desktop is on, hopefully they will have some bigger ones by then.
I did try an unplug and it worked fine, everything stayed powered and no reboots of the drives/switches.
In addition to the likely cheap electronics, LFP is a very durable chemistry, so it'd be quite surprising for the cells to actually need replacing in this unit. LFP cells good for thousands of cycles, and a UPS likely sees at most tens of cycles a year. In a well-made UPS, it'd probably be a tossup as to whether the LFP cells or the caps failed due to calendar aging first.
LFP's durability also extends to mistreatment, so it's more likely that if this cheap UPS sets your house on fire, it'll be due to the cheap electronics instead of the battery cells themselves.
Yeah, LFP is pretty hard to get to thermal runaway. Oh, they might off gas, which is bad, but still really hard to do. Like, you have to puncture the cells and initiate a short, or way overcharge them or something. Or your house is on fire anyways.
I need to replace the lead-acid batteries in my CyberPower UPS' in the next year or so. They seldom discharge all the way, maybe once every year or so. Should I replace them with lipo? Would they last more than 3 years?
Do they? I bought a 12v LFP in a standard(-ish) 12v lead acid format. It didn't quite fit in the battery compartment and the UPS complained about it instantly.
There are supposed to be ones that are close, but there's definitely a slight chemistry mismatch and you probably need one with an internal charge balancer that doesn't wait until it's "full" at 14.6V to run the internal charge-up balancing algorithm. I'd like one, but haven't done the work to figure what works (or fits!).
They do but as I said we've barely tried a handful. I was skeptical too, but at least one has been working fine for a few weeks now.
Continues to work fine, I've had several one second outages lately that it has caught and switched over to battery. No excessive noise, just one soft beep. So far the unit appears solid and good to go.
As an example, replacing the 2x12V(in series) SLA's in a PowerWalker VI 1200.
New LifePO4 next to the old SLA's(they can't hold a charge anymore, so are dead). LifePO4's are Ultramax SLAUMXLI10-12's:
Batteries were charged to bring them to the same SOC. In theory the "correct" way to do it is to have them in parallel off a single charger, but I just used a multimeter to verify they had identical voltage levels after charging.
Installed, they fit without issues:
I've since put it through a few charge/discharge cycles, and the builtin BMS is happy to bring the batteries to 13.4V off the UPS charger and sit there. No extra heat or burning.
A couple of things to note if you're thinking about doing a similar swap:
1) these are only "drop in" replacements insofar as the size and voltage will be compatible
2) however, continuous discharge will not match, so you need to make sure that whatever your load is can be met by your batteries
3) in the above swap, the Ultramax's are 10A, with a peak of 13.4V(ups charged) and cutoff of 10V. So, in series with 10% inverter loss, a conservative ~240W to ~180W(fully drained). Bit below the "600W peak" of the original SLA's and testing did trigger a BMS shutdown when I went over those limits
4) you will probably need to work in a way to reset the BMS if you want to avoid re-opening the UPS from a full drain or over current shutoff. In my case it's 2 extra leads to attach a charger(as the BMS wants to see ~13V before it'll reset)
5) buy batteries from "reputable" brands with spec sheets, and probably not off Amazon. There are some wildly inaccurate listings out there
As the above was successful, I plan to get some PowerBrick PB+ 12/7.5Ah's in(15A continuous) and shift the Ultramax's to some smaller UPS's supporting low draw devices. The above UPS is meant for my NAS and the peak draw during a RAID verify is ~270W, so not workable.
I will also keep an eye out for a cheap APC C1500, as it seems to be the "ideal" LifePO4 conversion candidate based on the battery form factor it uses, as there are some high-C LifePO4 variants out there of them.
As I've seen Lipo mentioned a couple times, LFP and Lipo are not the same thing.
Lipo: Lithium Polymer - used in RC aircraft, etc.
LFP: Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) - less energy dense, but much safer.
Lipo: Lithium Polymer - used in RC aircraft, etc.
LFP: Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) - less energy dense, but much safer.
And you really have to be sure you get something designed for drop-in replacement for SLA-based applications. Lead-acid has a neat property of being able to indefinitely float-charge so they can always be on standby with a small current going in, and not damage the battery at all.
Lithium chemistries can't do this natively, so they have those battery management systems integrated that trick SLA-designed units into thinking they're getting a constant trickle charge when in reality they're letting the LiFePo4 batteries sit idle and only pass along power to keep them at an optimal state of charge every once in a while.
Lots of standalone LiFePo4 batteries don't have the specific BMS design requirements to do this, so getting rando units off the Internet and swapping them into your UPS doesn't always work.
Lithium chemistries can't do this natively, so they have those battery management systems integrated that trick SLA-designed units into thinking they're getting a constant trickle charge when in reality they're letting the LiFePo4 batteries sit idle and only pass along power to keep them at an optimal state of charge every once in a while.
Lots of standalone LiFePo4 batteries don't have the specific BMS design requirements to do this, so getting rando units off the Internet and swapping them into your UPS doesn't always work.
Are these the ones you are talking about moving to: https://www.intellitecmv.com/products/lfp-powerbrick-12v-7-5ah
Yes, and initial testing is positive vs the Ultramax's:
35 minute runtime with a constant power of 145W(the Ultramax's cut off after ~5 minutes as C was >10A).
Installing them will have to wait however, as I've run out of AWG12 6.3mm spade connectors. But the plan is to do the same as I did with a single battery PSU that will use the Ultramax, with an SAE port for external charging/BMS kickstart if I trigger a full drain, and a DPDT switch that allows me to move the battery between the inverter and the charge port.
Internal:
Exnternal:
These are on Black Friday / Cyber Monday sale at Amazon for $160.
It also seems they've added a mute function. We will see if it is good enough to keep me from disabling the speaker...
It also seems they've added a mute function. We will see if it is good enough to keep me from disabling the speaker...
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Still no sign of this in the UK, which is a shame. I'd pick one up in a heartbeat.
Have had mine in for 2 months or so now, have had a few short outages with no issues. OTOH most of these outages have been when I'm not around so no idea how annoying it is when it switches to battery.