( 10 reviews )
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Posted: Nov 23 2008
Bought this product along w/ matching auxiliary battery pack BR24BP based on APC's Selector - an online app which asks about your equipment then recommends the products you should consider. The Selector gave me bad advice for my MacPro. I was never able to completely ascertain what the mismatch was about, but threads I found suggested it was either "inrush current" where a waking computer's current needs spike momentarily OR something to do with this APC unit not producing a "sine wave output." In any event, any time the APS unit was needed to step in due to an electrical outage, the waking of my sleeping Mac immediately overloaded the BR1500 and everything crashed. I returned this unit and replaced it with APC's Smart-UPS 1500 and have never had another issue. Bottom line: APC's Selector needs an overhaul. The two stars aren't meant to say the BR1500 is necessarily a bad product, but rather that its suitability to task was NOT what the Selector said it was.
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Posted: Oct 14 2008
I had one of these for just over a year. i got rid of it because of repeated "overload" faults that were occurring with greater and greater frequency. What would happen is that I'd come back into my office or come home to find the APC UPS screaming away, with no power to my computer (or modem or router). In every case, the red "overload" indicator would be lit. You might think that I'm simply overloading the unit. But all I had plugged into it was a Mac Pro, as well as my modem and router. At 1500 VA, it's rated for much more than that. And the kicker is, the majority of times the "overload" fault occurred was when the computer was asleep. I switched over to a MGE Pulsar UPS unit. One of the benefits of the switch is that the MGE unit does not require any proprietary software. Mac OS X recognizes the UPS and allows me to adjust the settings for it through the "Energy Saver" preference pane. Perhaps it was APC's PowerChute software that was the problem with the APC unit. Whatever it was, I'd recommend looking elsewhere for a UPS.
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Posted: Jul 8 2008
While this UPS is very powerful to hold up both my PC & Mac systems, there's One BIG problem the engineers didn't think of and that's "No alarm cut off switch!!!" Every now and then my neighborhood loses power, then my UPS kicks in. So normally I check to see if its my circuit breaker or the whole block. If its my circuit breaker I tried to silence the alarm before going to the basement, but found there's No alarm cut off for the APC BR1500..., UN-BELIEVABLE!
