10 kVA lithium UPS for a Central, Hong Kong, China machine room
Last updated 2026-11-07
In a Grade-A office tower in Central, Hong Kong, China, machine-room floor area is the scarcest resource. The brief was an hour of backup for financial office systems — and the physical space that a lead-acid bank of that capacity would have needed simply did not exist.
Project background
The tenant occupies office floors in a Central, Hong Kong, China financial centre and runs business systems from an in-building machine room: file and application servers, network core, access control and the trading-support workstations that depend on them.
The requirement was not exotic — keep critical equipment running through a mains interruption long enough to ride out a utility event or to shut down in order. But three constraints shaped the answer:
- Floor area. Machine rooms in commercial towers are small, and every rack unit is accounted for.
- Floor loading. Structural capacity in an office tower is not designed for a heavy battery room.
- Service access. Building management restricts when contractors can move equipment and materials through the building.
Configuration
UPS. A 10 kVA rack-format online double-conversion UPS was installed, sized for the connected load with headroom for the additional network equipment already on the capital plan. Double conversion matters here for a specific reason: financial-office loads include point-of-sale terminals, card readers and network gear that see mains transients as data errors long before they see them as outages.
Battery. LiFePO4 rack packs were used in place of a lead-acid bank, delivering approximately one hour of runtime at the design load. The decision was driven by space and mass rather than cycle life: at this capacity the lithium option occupies roughly a third of the volume and a fraction of the mass of the equivalent VRLA string, which kept the installation inside the room's structural and spatial limits.
Integration. The packs sit in the same rack line as the UPS, with the BMS reporting cell-level data to the UPS, so battery state appears on the UPS display and on the monitoring platform without a separate battery monitor.
Why this configuration suited the site
| Constraint | How it was addressed |
|---|---|
| Floor area | rack-format UPS and packs in the same cabinet line, no separate battery room |
| Floor loading | LiFePO4 mass roughly one third of VRLA for the same energy |
| Material handling | modules delivered and moved through passenger-service lifts in manageable weights |
| Runtime growth | additional packs can be added later without changing the UPS |
| Maintenance access | pack replacement is a drawer operation, no lifting gear |
Results
The room now rides through utility interruptions of up to about an hour at design load, which covers the building's generator transfer sequence with margin. Battery data is visible at the UPS and on the monitoring platform, so capacity fade is a trend line rather than a surprise.
The less obvious benefit is scheduling. Because pack replacement does not require a crane, a dedicated battery room or a building-wide works permit, the maintenance plan can be executed inside normal building hours — which in a tenanted tower is often the difference between a maintained system and a deferred one.
What transfers to other commercial buildings
- In dense buildings, energy density is the deciding specification. Cycle life and efficiency matter, but if the battery cannot physically fit, they are academic.
- One hour is usually the right target for an office tenant. It covers a generator transfer and a controlled shutdown; longer runtimes push capacity and mass into territory that office floors were not designed for.
- Keep battery and host in the same rack line when the room is small, and accept the thermal coupling only if room cooling is adequate — generally below 30 °C ambient at the rack inlet.
- Confirm permissible floor loading with the building's structural drawings before ordering. This is the step most often skipped in leased premises.
Scope boundary
A rack solution at this scale suits office and branch machine rooms up to a few tens of kVA. Data halls with per-rack metering, dual-corded IT loads on two independent supplies, or rooms requiring 2N architecture need a different design — one where the UPS is part of an electrical distribution scheme rather than a standalone appliance.
Product references: ET6/10KRS PRO long-runtime rack UPS, HC series rack LiFePO4 battery, and UPS battery cabinet configuration.