3 ms·
No, the article is wrong: the low end UPS devices are bad on quality and functionality and lead-acid batteries in UPS devices is a lot shorter than some people
by AdrianB1 6y ago
No, the article is wrong: the low end UPS devices are bad on quality and functionality and lead-acid batteries in UPS devices is a lot shorter than some people would expect.
I still have a few APC Smart UPS's bought in 1999-2000 running in my house; at the same time I had a few cheapies that broke after a few years, sometimes in spectacular ways (electronic exploded melting part of the battery case); I will not name brands, it is not worth.
Since 2000 I changed cases full of batteries, usually every 2-3 years. The good thing with the APC Smart series is that it works even if it gives an alert that the battery is bad, but you will get a few minutes of power instead of 30-60 minutes (my server & NAS is very low power, 5% of the UPS capacity). I also set the server to shutdown when the battery is reaching 50%, so I never deplete the batteries. At the same time, the UPS on the water pump is usually running on batteries as much as it can, so I need to change these batteries after 2 years. I have both the server and the water pump in the basement, the temperature is around 16-20 degrees Celsius (winter-summer), when I was keeping the server and the UPS in the house the battery life was at half (~18 months). The heat and the deep discharge cycles are effectively killing batteries.
I had the same type of battery on my motorcycles, one lived about 8 years and a second one 6 years, but in very different conditions: it was warmer, but almost no discharges.
- zzz61831 6y agoDeep discharge is a factor, but not a big one, heat has very little effect, it only affects voltages at which battery will be considered overcharged or deeply discharged as specs are usually all for room temperature. I've used UPSes that discharge batteries no lower than 10.5 (no deep discharge) and only once in a couple of years and that charge them to and keep them at 13.6 volts under stable room temperature all year. All batteries lost most of the capacity after 3 years, two almost all of it, one had like 40% left. In five years only that one was still surviving short minutes outages, while initially was able to do a few hours. For comparison, I had one battery just laying around for 6 years in the same room without touching it and it lost only like 30%.
- Decade 6y agoIt turns out that APC intentionally overcharges the batteries to maximize runtime during the 2-year target battery lifetime, at the cost of killing the batteries relatively young. And the overcharged voltage drifts upwards over time. I found this forum posting while searching for how to maximize the runtime on my APC UPS: https://forums.overclockers.com.au/threads/hacking-the-newer-apc-upss-mini-worklog-howto.1205748/ https://forums.overclockers.com.au/threads/hacking-the-newer...