3 ms·
Two things about Lead-Acid or AGM based UPS's (regardless of UPS topology or design): 1.) check your battery health annually and replace bi-annually. I don't c
by francis_t_catte 6y ago
Two things about Lead-Acid or AGM based UPS's (regardless of UPS topology or design):
1.) check your battery health annually and replace bi-annually. I don't care about the battery quality, an always-online UPS is very hard on lead-based batteries. they're float charged basically all the time, and deep discharged during outages. if you're in a power failure prone area (i.e. more than one per year), invest in a generator too in order to avoid stressing the batteries with full discharges.
2.) check the battery float voltage with an actual volt meter to make sure the UPS is calibrated correctly. APC UPS's in particular, prior to and post the Schneider Electric buyout, had a lot of really poor cost-savings decisions applied to their enginnering. this included using a carbon film resistor-based voltage divider to measure the battery voltage on much (or all) of their Back-UPS and Smart-UPS range. if you don't know anything about resistor technology, carbon film resistors (especially cheap ones!) change in value due to temperature, humidity, and age, usually drifting up in resistance. this is a bad thing when you need a stable voltage reading...
oh and on APC's cost cutting measures; there's the fun time they stopped using nickel plating on the bus bars in their Symmetra UPS line. they switched to tin plating instead. apparently none of them had heard of tin whiskers. :)
- extrapickles 6y agoSome APC UPSs will check battery health monthly by switching to battery, and letting them run down. You will want to disable this feature as it takes 6-8hrs to recharge to full, leaving a massive random gap in coverage. This also puts undue wear on the batteries as they are only good for a dozen or two cycles.
- dn3500 6y agoAnother fun fact I discovered the hard way is that many APC UPSes refuse to go back into bypass when they are supplied by a small generator with a dirty waveform. We had quite a few APC units in the 1990s and 2000s, and I had the impression the older ones were easier on batteries. We were on a three year replacement cycle until Y2K, and after that we found it necessary to check the batteries every six months or so in the newer units.
- dan-robertson 6y agoDo you mean biannually (every 6 months) or biennially (every 24 months)?