Rufus the dog knows when it’s time for a nap. Rufus doesn’t care if your backup power or batteries are working or not. He is more worried about when you arrive home from work… and especially supper.
Batteries seldom fail without warning, but the warning is not visible. A UPS can appear to be working perfectly while its battery capacity declines unseen. You only find out there’s a problem when the power fails, and the backup doesn’t kick in. That’s where the SmartArx Energy Monitor comes in.
The Energy Monitor provides a continuous real-time overview of your backup power, including security batteries, site energy use, and UPS. Instead of discovering issues after they occur, you receive warnings in time to take corrective action.
It’s designed for the power conditions we deal with in South Africa. With load shedding, outages, and an unpredictable grid, having reliable backup power is essential.
You could have an inverter at home, a UPS at your workplace, or a backup battery for a security installation. Regardless of what system you’re safeguarding, it depends on the stability of its power supply. The Energy Monitor oversees this power continuously so you don’t have to.
It monitors two batteries separately, allowing you to quickly identify the healthy one versus the tired one. For each, it provides:
- Estimated run time, so you know how long it would genuinely last if the power dropped right now
- Cycles completed, which tells you how old the battery really is (batteries age by cycles, not birthdays; more on that below)
- Charge and discharge current
- Voltage
- Notifications when discharge starts, when the battery’s low, and when charging starts and ends
Connect a low-cost energy meter and the Energy Monitor also tracks your site’s energy use over time in kWh, along with live power draw in Watts. It’s useful for seeing where your power is actually going, and for spotting the load you didn’t know you had.
Plug into your UPS via the RS-232 port, and the Energy Monitor reads what the UPS normally keeps to itself: mains status, output voltage, battery voltage, load percentage, and battery-low warnings. It’ll even run scheduled tests on the UPS battery under calm, controlled conditions, so you learn the truth on an ordinary day instead of during a real outage.
In short, if you’re a South African, you need a SmartArx Energy Monitor.
Get Smart. Get SmartArx.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the SmartArx Energy Monitor do?
It monitors two backup batteries independently, tracks site energy usage, and interfaces with your on-site UPS, providing live data on battery health, runtime, and power status over WiFi or Ethernet.
How does it tell me my battery's age?
It counts completed charge and discharge cycles. Batteries age based on how many cycles they’ve been through, so cycle count is a far better measure of age and health than the battery’s installation date.
Can it test my UPS battery?
Yes. It runs scheduled UPS tests, briefly running the battery to confirm it still works, so you find out about a failing battery before a power failure does.