fentonups - Driver for Fenton Technologies (Megatec protocol) UPS equipment

This man page only documents the hardwarespecific features of the fentonups driver. For information about the core driver, see nutupsdrv(8).

fentonups primarily supports Fenton Technologies models such as the PowerPal, PowerPure and PowerOn lines. Due to the common heritage of UPS equipment, it generally supports other hardware that also uses the Megatec protocol.

At the time of this writing, the PowerGuard PG600 and PowerCom SMK800A are recognized and supported. Other Megatec units should also work, but they will generate a warning since their battery information is not known.

This driver supports the following optional settings in the ups.conf(5):

lowbattvolt=decimal

Sets a user-defined battery voltage under which the driver will consider that the UPS is on "low battery" condition when running on battery. This allows initiating a system shutdown before the UPS signals a low battery status by itself, and may be useful for some UPSes that don't have enough runtime left for properly shutting down the system when they start signaling a "low battery" status.

The battery percentage is derived from the voltage data that the UPS returns, since the UPS doesn't return that value directly. On some hardware, the charge will remain at 100% for a long time and then drops quickly shortly before the battery runs out. You can confirm from the battery.voltage readings that this is a problem with the UPS and not this driver.

Similarly, the float from the charger in some models forces the battery charge percentage back up to 100% immedately after the UPS goes back online, so you can't tell when it is really recharged.

Dead/broken batteries can't be reported reliably. If your UPS kills the load instantly or within seconds of starting the inverter, your batteries probably need to be replaced. Recently, a pair of 3.5 hour outages here (thanks CPS!) finally killed my batteries. You may have to run a manual test from the front panel before the "replace battery" LED will light.

Russell Kroll, Michel Bouissou

The core driver:

Internet resources: