A UPS (uninterruptible power supply) will benefit all South African businesses and organisations by protecting their electronics and helping them dodge the disruption caused by ESKOMs daily load shedding.
Load shedding isn’t going away anytime soon.
If you’re a business owner, you need a UPS.
What are the benefits of using a UPS in South Africa?
ESKOM’s failing infrastructure is affecting everyone. Many businesses are experiencing loss in production, loss in sales, damaged goods, and damage to sensitive equipment. Every business needs protection against load shedding and general power outages, not to mention power fluctuations.
The only solution for South African businesses these days is to have emergency backup power like a UPS, which can be coupled with a generator if you need longer standby time and if your situation allows. UPS backup is essential for IT systems, terminals, workstations, and other electrical components, as well as many other types of applications that we will investigate shortly.
Continuous business needs continuous power.
3 ways a UPS benefits your business
Many businesses close their doors or halt production during power outages. This means you lose money whenever there’s no electricity. Read that again – you lose money if you close your doors during load shedding. Customers are not going to stand around and wait for load shedding to pass—no… they are going to support your competitor that has invested in standby power.
Every business that wants to stay profitable needs to make a plan and invest in some sort of standby power. ESKOM has failed South African businesses, but they can adopt alternatives and take the power back.
Standby power is no longer a luxury.
Investing in a UPS will benefit your business in the following ways:
1. NO interruptions
Load shedding and power outages won’t affect your business. You never have to close your doors or halt production. When the mains power fails, your UPS will immediately kick in. This allows you time to save your work and safely shut down your systems properly or switch to a generator if you wish to keep going.
A UPS buys you the transfer time you need to keep the lights on, and the doors open so you don’t lose business.
2. Protects sensitive equipment
Critical equipment and electrical equipment are damaged by power spikes. A UPS will protect all electronic and electrical equipment from mains supply electrical noise and voltage spikes or dips or brown outs by means of built-in surge protection and in the case of double conversion UPS systems it has a rectifier and an inverter between the mains supply and the connected critical load which results in a double conversion process of power and completely protects your critical equipment and electronics.
3. Save money and make money
Yes, a UPS costs money, but it also saves money and makes money.
Let’s look at how a UPS can save money, then we’ll investigate how it can make money.
- A UPS allows safe shutdown, meaning you won’t have to pay for the ramifications of losing expensive data or hardware crashing when the mains power suddenly fails.
- A UPS protects sensitive electronic devices with an uninterrupted power flow, so you don’t have to replace expensive equipment which is damaged by bad power supply.
- Continued electrical connectivity allows business continuity. You will experience no interruptions in productivity or business services, which means you can keep making money.
Here is a practical example of how a UPS saved a printing company from going belly up.
ABC Printers’ average hourly turnover is R650. During load shedding stages 4, 5, and 6, they have to close their doors for 4 to 6 hours a day. This means they can only trade for 4 to 6 hours. They are open from 8am to 6pm, 6 days a week. For the sake of averages, let’s say they lose 4 hours of trading time every day.
4 hours multiplied by R650 per hour = R2600 per day in lost sales.
Multiply that by the 25 days that they are open in a month, and the answer is a staggering loss of R65,000!
In ONE MONTH, their UPS and battery purchase could pay for itself!
What industries will benefit from having a UPS?
All industries will benefit from the power protection and stability that a UPS offers. Apart from being a reliable standby power source, they offer dependable connectivity and allow for a safe shutdown of business-critical machinery (or time to transfer the load to another standby power source such as a standby generator set).
Businesses that would benefit from an uninterruptible power supply system include:
1. Healthcare and Medical Facilities
In the case of critical services like hospitals, hospices, frail care facilities, and emergency medical services, power outages can result in a loss of life. In these fields, a UPS could be a matter of life and death. For example, there are numerous life-support machines like ventilators and incubators that must receive uninterrupted power.
Apart from the human element, hospitals and medical facilities use highly sensitive electronic equipment from image scanning to high end laboratories, that are susceptible to power surges and spikes. A UPS will protect the sensitive connected medical load.
2. IT, consulting services, data centres, and banks
Data centres, consulting services, banks, and IT departments are vulnerable to data loss, hardware damage and security system breaches when the mains power fails. No business can afford to lose sensitive information and valuable data.
A UPS ensures that the internal network and servers of a bank, consulting service, IT department, and data centre are always online and not vulnerable to hackers or a cyberattack, therefore safeguarding data and company reputations.
3. Emergency Services
Services such as emergency call centres, transportation control centres, and water and waste control centres cannot operate without electricity at risk of a public or environmental disaster. In South Africa, we’ve already seen the sad reality of sewage spills resulting in beach closures and river pollution, as our sewage works cannot function when there’s load shedding. This is an ecological disaster that is avoidable by installing UPS’s for backup power.
4. Manufacturing, factories, and production lines
A UPS on your production line will reduce loss in production, protect sensitive equipment, and prevent the loss of data,
5. Educational facilities
As more and more teaching centres move away from blackboards and books to employ teaching methods that are dependent on electricity, educational centres will benefit from UPS systems. In addition, a UPS will keep systems like Wi-Fi networks, security cameras, alarms and bells, and CCTV up and running.
6. Telecommunication and cable companies
A UPS will protect sensitive equipment, prevent data loss, and ensure the continuation of telecommunication services.
7. Businesses with sensitive electronic equipment
A UPS switches to battery backup power in the event of a power failure and voltage sags or spikes. That means when ESKOM’s supply drops below or surges above safe levels, the UPS instantly switches to DC battery power and converts it to AC power to run the connected load safely.
8. Retailers
As demonstrated with our ABC Printers example earlier, closing your doors and not trading during load shedding is negatively impacting your turnover. You are losing money. Invest in a UPS, and in a few months, it will pay for itself.
Do you need a UPS so that your business is not at the mercy of ESKOM’s load-shedding schedule?
Where can I get a UPS for my business in South Africa?
The best place to buy a UPS is from a reputable UPS provider that can assess your specific needs. If you buy a UPS that’s too large, you’re wasting money; too small, it will fail you. The first step is to accurately calculate the size of your standby load. As your business grows and your finances allow, you can add on to your UPS, as many systems are stackable and parallelable.
Standby Systems has a team of experts available to assess your unique UPS power requirements and advise you on the best UPS solution and backup battery to suit your pocket and for your business continuity.