The APC BX1500M UPS Review

This is the APC Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) model BX1500M I purchased for $185 on amazon. My existing UPS was getting old and it was time to replace it so I decided to swap for a different brand APC. This was a bit of an upgrade since my last UPS was a Cyberpower that only had 1350 Volt Amperes (VA) compared to the 1500 VA of my new UPS

This new APC UPS has 10 NEMA 5-15R ports five of which are available for battery backup, the other five are surge protection only. It also has protection for Coaxial and Ethernet if your application requires it.

It also has Automatic Voltage Regulation (AVR) that will supplement low input voltage from the grid. My old UPS has been going bananas because of the current strain on the power grid due to the recent hot summer days. I saw input from the grid as low as 90 volts, just so you are aware in North America we are supposed to be getting 120 volts from the grid, so a 25 percent decrease is not good.

Other than that, the UPS is pretty standard it has a small display with a silence button a power button and a menu cycle button and uses your typical sealed lead acid batteries.

APC ships this with the batteries disconnected so to get it connected you need to slid open the battery compartment flip the battery 180 degrees and slide it back in to get it operational. I will be posting a YouTube Video of the process but here is a picture of the manual depicting the process.

This UPS doesn’t use the typical USB A cable or what I like to call the printer cable to connect to your PC it actually uses an RJ45 to USB serial similar to an old Cisco switch. Thankfully one of these comes included in the package although this cable is nearly useless to me since I am running Linux.

You see APC does have monitoring software for this UPS and its called PowerChute serial shutdown and at first glance it appears that it works on Linux. However if you check the compatibility chart you will see in the fine print that Linux is not supported with this model.

I found out that this isn’t that big of a deal because in Linux Kubuntu I can configure some very basic commands for battery level thresholds. It just sucks that I don’t get all the cool telemetry from the PowerChute software.

The other tempting option is to try and install the windows version of the software with wine. But for now I can at least configure kubuntu to shutdown when the UPS battery reaches a threshold that I set so that will get me by until APC can hopefully add Linux support.

So that is about it I have used these UPS’s before and they are high quality and reliable I also like the fact that they include a signed print out of the quality assurance test, that is a nice touch.