--- title: "UniFi now makes a UPS: does your network need one?" description: "Ubiquiti's UPS Tower and rack-mount UPS 2U bring battery backup into UniFi. What they do well, where they fall short, and how to size one." date: 2026-08-25 updated: 2026-08-25 category: networks tags: [UniFi, UPS, backup power, network closet] url: "https://relaypoint.ca/blog/unifi-ups-network-backup-power" author: RelayPoint Technologies --- If you live or run a business in Norfolk, Haldimand or anywhere rural in Southern Ontario, you already know the power here is not something you take for granted. A summer thunderstorm rolls through, the lights flicker, and suddenly your Wi-Fi is down, your cameras are dark, and your NVR is doing an ungraceful reboot that it may or may not recover from cleanly. Ubiquiti now sells its own answer to this: the UniFi UPS Tower, a compact desktop unit, and the rack-mount UPS 2U for network closets. We've been asked about them a few times already, so here's our honest take on what they do, what they don't, and whether one belongs in your setup. ## What you actually get The UPS Tower is a 1,000VA/600W line-interactive unit with a 12V 9Ah lead-acid battery that you can swap yourself when it wears out. It has ten NEMA outlets: five with battery backup plus surge protection, and five with surge protection only. It sells for about US$159, which is competitive with the CyberPower and APC units we'd normally spec at this size. The rack-mount UPS 2U steps up to 1,440VA/1,000W with two 9Ah batteries, four battery-backed outlets and four surge-only outlets, in a standard 2U chassis that fits neatly under a switch in a network cabinet. The headline feature isn't the battery, though. It's the integration. Both units have a network port and show up in your UniFi Network application like any other UniFi device. You can see real-time load, battery health and estimated runtime right in the dashboard, next to your switches and access points. They can also trigger a graceful shutdown of a UniFi NVR or UNAS before the battery runs out, and they run a built-in NUT (Network UPS Tools) server, so a Synology, a home server or any other NUT-compatible device can be told to shut down cleanly too. For anyone who has ever tried to get a third-party UPS talking to their gear over USB and vendor software, that last part is genuinely useful. It's the difference between an outage being a non-event and an outage corrupting a week of camera footage. ## Be realistic about runtime Here's the part the spec sheet won't shout about: the official runtime numbers are 2 minutes at full load and 7 minutes at half load for the Tower. That sounds alarming until you remember that a typical UniFi closet — gateway, PoE switch, a few access points and cameras — draws nowhere near 600W. StorageReview measured roughly 50 minutes of runtime at a realistic 36–48W network load. So for a home or small office network, expect the Tower to ride through the short flickers and brownouts that cause most equipment grief, and to keep your internet, Wi-Fi and cameras up for somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour in a real outage. That covers the majority of interruptions we see around here. It will not carry you through a multi-hour storm outage — for that you need a generator or a much larger battery system, and the UPS becomes the bridge that keeps things alive until the generator picks up. ## What to watch out for A few honest caveats before you order one. The output on battery is a simulated sine wave, not a pure sine wave. For networking equipment this is a non-issue, but we wouldn't hang sensitive audio gear or certain server power supplies off it. There's currently no built-in self-test or runtime calibration, so the UPS can't periodically verify its own battery the way some enterprise units do. Lead-acid batteries typically give you three to five years; put a reminder in your calendar. And the graceful-shutdown integration is at its best inside the UniFi ecosystem. If your recorder is a UNVR or UNAS, it's seamless. Third-party devices work via NUT, but that takes a bit of configuration. Ubiquiti has also signalled that higher-capacity models with pure sine-wave output and lithium batteries are coming, so if you need more than 600W of protected load today, it may be worth speccing a larger third-party unit or waiting. ## What we recommend Every network we install gets some form of battery backup on the core — that's been our standard long before Ubiquiti made its own UPS. Your internet gateway, main switch and NVR are the pieces that hate hard power loss the most, and they're also the pieces you want running during an outage, when cameras and connectivity matter more than ever. For a UniFi-based home or small business, the UPS Tower is now an easy recommendation: one vendor, one dashboard, clean shutdowns, sensible price. For a business rack, the UPS 2U keeps the cabinet tidy and protects more load. If you're running non-UniFi gear or need long runtimes, a traditional UPS or a generator-plus-UPS combination is still the right call, and we're happy to spec that instead. If you'd like backup power added to your network — or you're not sure what your closet actually draws — we install and manage this gear across Norfolk, Oxford, Brant and Haldimand counties, Hamilton, Burlington and Oakville. [Get in touch](/contact) and we'll size it properly the first time. ## Sources - [UniFi UPS Tower — official tech specs](https://techspecs.ui.com/unifi/integrations/ups-tower-us?subcategory=all-integrations) - [UniFi UPS 2U — official tech specs](https://techspecs.ui.com/unifi/integrations/ups-2u-us?subcategory=all-integrations) - [StorageReview: Ubiquiti UPS Tower review](https://www.storagereview.com/review/ubiquiti-ups-tower-review-compact-unifi-power-protection-for-home-labs-and-network-closets) - [HostiFi: Ubiquiti introduces compact UPS Tower with UniFi integration](https://www.hostifi.com/blog/ubiquiti-introduces-new-compact-ups-tower-with-unifi-integration)