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I know it can be done with Arduino, so Pi should also be able to facilitate this. It entails having the device (pi, arduino) monitor and log the voltage it receives. Do this from a fully charged battery all the way down to a depleted one. Boot the system back up and look at the minimum and maximum voltages received. You now know the limits of the battery in its current setup, and can use the lowest as 1% and the highest as 100% capacity for your system, which is easy to display at all times through a display module for instance. This is how I understand it, but you may require some searching online to confirm this method.

With a full house, of more devices connecting, the battery runs dry before the 150 minute mark I have noticed. Hopefully at the end of the month I can mod the 12AH battery in and monitor the situation from then to see what type of charge stays behind after 150 minutes.

This is what I expected but wanted to know for sure. Your comment is invaluable to me and I thank you! I'm thinking the branding agency printed the website name wrong since it should be .info and not .co.za. In fact I cannot find references that the .co.za domain in question ever even existed. If it did I bet they moved over to the free .info domain since its, well, free. I'm 99% sure the device is simply an imported "brandless" device which is then rebranded locally. Without a specification sheet I won't be willing to consider it though. Need to know whats inside 🙂 Thank you Richard, this makes sense and I learned a new term! Another 2 sessions of loadshedding has now passed and for some reason the system held on for the entire duration. It could be that the session was cut short since the power went on 20 minutes earlier than scheduled each time, which means the system lasted 130 minutes each time. Right now I am thinking that perhaps a cheaper upgrade to the 9AH battery should suffice? The 12AH is about R200 more than the 9AH, and I'm finding it hard to justify the difference if the results will be the same. On the other hand, perhaps since the 12AH wont be fully depleted during the loadshedding it would extend the battery's life? That's probably the only reason then to fork out an extra R200. Worth it?

That unit looks perfect! If only I did my research before going out and getting the UPS. 😢 I've got these from China. (See Attached) The top stuff with a red border I'm still waiting for but haven't heard from the post office for obvious reasons. The multimeter works. The soldering iron works. It's not good by any standard I'm allowed to judge with as I have no experience with soldering (but the headset I "fixed" works!). The reason I got cheap stuff is so I don't have to cry too much when I accidentally destroy it while practicing. I think I have heard about the buck converters before while looking up a way to convert a battery operated device to AC wall power. Thanks for the link, Communica has great parts and good prices. I also use Yebo Electronics and DC3 Distribution.

I completely agree that its wasteful to conversion, but I am not knowledgeable enough to wire directly to battery AND have the battery on an auto-charging inverter from AC, hench the UPS, to do the work for me. But I'm willing to learn! We are losing some power in this scenario to both the conversion and the UPS monitoring subsystem, I would assume. Going directly from the battery would be far less wasteful. Now if only I knew how to safely wire that and still keep everything "automated". I just acquired some cheap electronic components and hardware and will solder if need be. Today's loadshedding reported that the system stayed up and running for 130 minutes. I believe it is so much more than yesterday's 90-120 ballpark since no wireless devices was connected to the one router and only half to the other, so less traffic meaning less power draw, I assume.

Thank you for the info Richard. To my best knowledge I do have an UPS and not an inverter. Sorry if I was unclear or if I'm misunderstanding. EDIT: On inspection of your recommendation I have some more questions. I want to know how the PUPS unit achieves longer battery life than a conventional UPS. I also do not wish to buy excessively right now and would rather try and figure out a solution using the tech I have installed. The PUPS unit seems too much like a mystery with no access to a spec sheet as well as being R150 more than a line-interactive UPS of the same caliber. It was worth checking out regardless, thank you for bringing it to my attention. Thanks Crankshaft, I will keep that in mind.

Hello! I would greatly appreciate some more established advice on my situation. I have three devices to run from UPS power during Stage 1-4 loadshedding. D-Link DSL-2750U (12V, 1A), TP-Link Archer C20 (9V, 0.6A), Raycore CPE (Not 100% sure about model but believe the PSU is also 9V, 06A) I have a Mecer ME-650-VU (Rated at 360W max output) UPS. It has a single 12V, 7AH battery. I do not know how much power the UPS subsystems use to monitor and power itself, but I (hopefully over-) guesstimated no more than 12 Watt. If my calculations are correct (and my knowledge on this matter is mostly assumptive and self-tought, I would appreciate corrections!) my system's max usage at any given time should be 35W. In a zero-loss scenario the battery should provide 84AH worth of power. In a real-world scenario this is probably lower than 75AH (super optimistic assumption of only 10% efficiency loss). Currently the power lasts between 90 minutes and 120 minutes. Unfortunately I couldn't see the exact time it went off but I'm certain of this time window. My questions are as follow: Would running my current system off a 12AH battery extend my uptime to over the 180 minute mark? and Would swapping out the standard 7AH battery in the ME-650-VU with a 12AH one cause any problems? Bonus Question: Would disabling either the 5.0GHz or 2.4GHz channels on the C20 router reduce power consumption enough to make a noticeable difference and if so, which band uses more power? My understanding so far is that upping the capacity would proportionally increase the charge time on the battery. Thanks for your help and time!