When is a UPS battery actually bad? APC SUA750

Coleman Kane cokane at cokane.org
Tue Jun 17 11:46:20 EDT 2008


On Tue, 2008-06-17 at 11:26 -0400, Alex Hewitt wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-06-17 at 11:11 -0400, Thomas Charron wrote:
> > On 6/17/08, Alex Hewitt <hewitt_tech at comcast.net> wrote:
> > > Which basically says - the indicator doesn't necessarily mean the
> > > battery is bad. It has some kind of timer which turns the LED on
> > > theoretically one to two months before the battery "might" need
> > > replacing.
> > 
> >   Woot!  Shared technology between UPS batteries and car engine status
> > lights!  :-D
> > 
> 
> A good chunk of the time the UPS has long since passed it's "sell by
> date" and the users just keep the things plugged in. The batteries are
> useless as is the UPS but hey it's cheaper than buying a new one (that
> works). ;^)
> 
> -Alex
> 

At that point, in my experience, some of them start to become IPS'es:
Interrupting Power Supplies. Some of them exhibit a behavior whereby
they determine battery utility by cutting the power occasionally and
running off battery for a few minutes/seconds to auto-determine how the
battery responds to the power draw, and storing this info in its tables
for use by the firmware. If the battery is beyond dead, the unit will
simply cause a power cycle for you and your happily connected devices.
Of course, this is well after the UPS has already just become an
overly-expensive surge protector (with bonus monitoring features!). You
*were* expected to replace the battery at the proper intervals...

Then there are the ones that produce the incessant beeping noise...

I kind of favor my laptop for these reasons, as it has a built-in
UPS ;).

I wasn't aware of the comment earlier about the UPS destroying your
surge protectors attached to it (rendering them tap-only). That is
interesting...

-- 
Coleman Kane
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