AEG Protect A. 1000 review

Despite the UPS market being crowded enough already, German electronics giant AEG now wants a piece of the action in the UK.

The Protect family covers everything from home users to enterprises, and the A series targets small businesses looking for essential protection for workstations and phone systems. The 1,000VA model is third in the line and offers enough battery power to keep a workstation and its monitor going for around 30 minutes in a blackout.

The 1000 is a line-interactive UPS that uses mains power. An inverter charges the battery and stops the UPS switching to battery during brief voltage fluctuations. It provides a faster switchover time than low-cost offline models, and is ideal for when power failures are rare but voltage fluctuations are frequent.

The 1000 offers four fully protected output sockets, plus two that provide only surge protection. One set of input/output RJ-11 ports protect comms equipment, while for monitoring the UPS offers both serial and UPS ports. The LCD panel provides information about the battery charge status, incoming power and load.

The quality of system shutdown and monitoring software varies hugely across vendors. AEG's UPSMan software is in need of graphical refreshment, but it worked well.

Using a USB link we could view bar graphs of input power, load and calculated battery run-time. Specific applications, the OS and the host system can be safely shut down so many minutes after switching to battery, and 15 event types such as overloads and high battery loads can be monitored, and alerts sent out via email and SNMP traps. It's also possible to load a client utility on other systems that accept shutdown commands remotely.

The management software may not be sophisticated and you have only four fully protected sockets, but at £180 exc VAT, the Protect A. 1000 is a good value line-interactive UPS.

Author: Dave Mitchell