Review Of The CyberPower CP1500AV

I don’t normally like to do negative reviews – even on a product that completely fails practically right out of the box.  My feeling is that no company can have “zero” manufacturing defects.  Sooner or later a lemon makes it out the doors and into the hands of a consumer – which is exactly what happened to me.  I generally don’t hold it against a manufacturer in the rare instances that this sort of thing happens to me.  What matters more to me is how the company handles these kinds of problems.  Which is why I felt compelled in this case to share my unfortunate experience with CyberPower.  

Back in 2014 I bought the CyberPower CP600VA uninterruptible power supply, or UPS.  Great product.  It never gave me any problems and came in quite handy during brief power outages over the years.  It provided plenty of time to save your work and get your devices properly powered down during unexpected power loss.  It finally died at the end of 2024 – 10 years of service life seemed more than reasonable to me.  So I went looking on Amazon for another CyberPower product.  This time I went more “up market” and selected one of the more premium consumer models – the CP1500AV.  There seems to be a couple of different CP1500AV model variations, but technically speaking I had the CP1500VARLCD3.  It retails on the CyberPower Systems website for $209.95.  I had about $150 in reward points and gift certificates, so I ended up only paying about $60.00 out of pocket for the unit.  Yea me.  I received it on November 27^th, read the directions, hooked it up, and like any good UPS, I forgot about it.  That is until about a month later on the evening of January 14^th.  I had worked from home that day and was upstairs.  I began to hear a faint, but vaguely familiar intermittent beeping noise.  I couldn’t quite localize it.  Did I leave the refrigerator open?  Nope.  Beeping is coming from downstairs.  As I got downstairs to my photography studio/office area, it was clear to me that my UPS was beeping to alert me that everything plugged into it was now running on battery power.  Which was extremely curious because we were not experiencing any sort of power loss.  I checked under desk and everything was plugged in properly.  Had we popped a fuse in the fuse box?  Nope.  I tested the outlet and there was no issue there either.  I then shut down everything plugged into the UPS and powered down the UPS to stop it from beeping.  I then took it to a different outlet and plugged it in, and pressed the “power on” button.  It beeped at me, but wouldn’t turn on.  Not good.  I repeated this process several times to no avail.  My brand new UPS was a lemon.  

My next step was to go to the CyberPower website and explore options for obtaining a replacement unit.  At this point I’m thinking, “not a big deal…it happens.”  CyberPower has a “chat” function on their website (joy…) so I provided my model and serial number from my unit and started a chat.  After the chat initiated I typed a lengthy description of my issue…only to have the chat window crap out.  I repeated this again with the same result, then switched from Firefox to Safari and was finally able to send messages to the chat representative.  (Note:  if your chat system is browser dependent, it’s crap).  Going into the is process, I expected that the chat representative would take me though a series of scripted actions to try in order to determine if the unit was truly “dead.”  What I did not expect was  is to spend the next 45 minutes of Q&A from the support rep, followed by an unending stream of “next, try this.”  After having jumped through every possible hoop, I was told “I think your unit is defective” by the support rep.  “OK” I typed – “can I now send you my proof of purchase and get a replacement sent?”  She replied that I could, and I uploaded some screenshots from my Amazon orders screen, showing that I had purchased the unit.  After all this, she then informed me that I would only be sent a replacement unit when first I sent the defective unit to them, and that they would provide me a shipping label to send it back.

I can perfectly understand why they would want to get the unit back, if for no other reason to try to determine what caused the unit to fail.  But there’s a right way to do this and the wrong way…and CyberPower was going about it entirely the wrong way.  You’ve already sold the customer product that’s failed within about a month.  Now you’re asking your customer to spend their valuable time tracking down a box, pack up the defective unit you sold them, and spend their gas schlepping the package to the nearest shipping center.  And that’s not forget that this thing weighs 25 pounds and is not small.  Not just any old box is going to work to ship this thing back.

I then informed the representative in the chat that this option was not acceptable.  I did not have a box suitable to return ship the item.  I’d be more than willing to ship the item back so long as they provided a “white glove“ return shipping option where I simply took the unit to FedEx or UPS, handed it to them and they handled the packing… Or they could ship me inappropriate box with a shipping label on it.  I spent the next 30 minutes arguing with her and waiting for her to check with her superiors on different shipping options….to no avail.  I was told that if I did not have a suitable box that I could purchase one.  sure, I’m certain I could… But why am I coming out of pocket because you shipped me a faulty product?  There’s also the issue that the representative was sure to inform me that a replacement unit would be sent to me so long as the defective unit was “properly“ shipped back to them.  In other words, I could jump through all these hoops, and there would still be a chance they would not ship me a replacement unit because they deemed the shipment of the defective unit back to them is not being “properly” shipped.  it was clear they were making this process as difficult as they possibly could which made me trust them less and less.  I even presented the option of them shipping the replacement unit, which would provide me the proper box to package my defective unit and sent back to them.  After being on the chat about an hour and 45 minutes, I was finally presented the option of signing some paperwork and providing my credit card number to charge me for a replacement unit.  Once I receive the replacement unit, I could ship back the defective unit, and after they received it, they would reverse the charges on the replacement unit.  This was extraordinarily frustrating because A) why the heck did they not lead with this option? It would’ve saved me an hour of arguing with the support representative in the chat.  And B) this option put me in the position of having to place a lot of trust in a company that had eroded any trust had in them.  Would they take forever to process and reverse the charge? Would they actually reverse the charge?  process and reverse at this point, I was completely frustrated and tired of being in this chat so I accepted the option and the representative quickly and rudely ended the chat.

after this excruciating and exhausting experience, I went upstairs and made some dinner and considered my options.  I really wasn’t sure that it was worth my time and effort to jump through these hoops and hope that CyberPower would come through.  So I decided to give Amazon a call and see if there was anything they could do.  God bless Amazon because A) You can still speak to a live human being on the phone, And B) After hearing my experience with CyberPower, Amazon presented me the option of either sending me a replacement unit, or getting a complete refund.  They didn’t even ask me to return the defective unit.  Now THAT is customer service.  I opted to get a complete refund.  When the money hit my account just a couple of hours later I turned right around and gave the Amazon on the money right back, purchasing some other IT equipment that I needed for some upgrades that I’m doing to my home system.

It really is a shame that I was so frustrated with CyberPower that I opted to not get a replacement unit because I researched uninterruptible  power supply options and their products really are well rated.  But after sales, customer support is still important and on that basis, I recommend staying away from CyberPower and their products.