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Many years ago, I was given a dead UPS, an APC BackUPS280 or something similar. I took this UPS and replaced its battery – and it rose from the dead, tho it did take a bit more than 3 days.
It seems there’s an alarmingly high percentage of people who acquire a UPS, and when the battery turns into a rock 3 years later, they throw whole UPS out. Or at least, throw ’em in a corner and forget about them… which is mildly better for the enviroment as it gives me an opportunity to find and sieze possesion. This is evidenced by the fact that I own about 10 UPSes and I’ve never bought one new (for myself, several for clients tho.)
I think the first time I ever even encountered a new UPS was Pesty’s Belkins… and they both melted/caught-fire… and for some reason I was the one running out of his house with a smoldering UPS into -30C winter… with socks on. No Belkins for me. Thanks.
Since that experience, I’ve had a very strong preference for American Power Conversion (APC) units because I’d simply not had any bad experiences with them.
Recently, I’ve had good fortune to come upon a big, APC 2200 3U Rackmount, and a PowerWare 9125, my first non-APC unit. Again, these units were put in the corner and left to gather dust because “that one’s dead, struck by lightning or something” or “yeah, that one just died after a few years of running flawlessly”… and as expected – both units had *extremely* dead batteries…
I expect the one that was “struck by lightning” (the APC2200) had transferred to battery on loss of input power and instead of 48VDC, got a pittance of 7 volts… and after the whole unit had failed and locked-out, when the engineer tried to turn it back on, the charger probably thought there was _NO_ batteries or an open circuit in one, so it wasn’t going to turn on if it was only going to act as a very heavy power distribution unit (PDU… aka “expensive power bar” with isolation transfomer)
When I opened this unit up, I could immediately see it wasn’t going to work with swollen cells (serious heat, overcharging and/or overuse) that were only putting out ~3 volts in 24 volt configurations (2 packs in series.) I actually had to dismantle the framing and half of the chassis just to get them out… and it doesn’t help that APC glues the packs together. 8 cells in all. Took almost an hour to get them all out.
PowerWare probably failed while in normal operation because it’s a full double-conversion unit. The way it works normally is the power it outputs comes from the battery, and isn’t passed thru from the mains input, (as most APC Smart UPSes do.) By nature of design, the charger would’ve maintained the batteries to the best of it’s ability, but when the batteries turned into rocks (sulfated) after years of neglect, the charger just gave up. A short time later, likely minutes, the power from the battery was insufficient to operate the load and the unit turned off and locked-out. When I plugged it in, it did absolutely nothing… no clicks, hum, blinky-lights… nada. 🙁
I’ve wanted a PowerWare for some time, back at Sedona Networks we’d had a few of them, and the management and reporting from the was impressively comprehensive; per-outlet metering, pretty graphics and other goodness. I was impressed with it’s design and layout as well when I opened it up. The battery pack was in a plastic casing to facilitate easy installation, the wiring arrangement I found a little odd, but I made sense of it – and documented it on the lid of the UPS. Because I’ve struggled with wiring and arragements before in 4 cell UPSes.
Around the same time I was investigating those units, my in-service APC SUA700N UPS started trying to melt. Apparently this older, stupider unit doesn’t have very good charger controls and was basically trying to recharge the now-sulfated batteries… it must’ve been pushing a lot of power trying to recharge them because at last look the internal temperature of the UPS was in the high 60s!
So it was time to order batteries… 8 for the 2200, 2 for the 700, 4 for the 9125… probably should do the BU280 too because it’d been a while… erk… that’s 15 batteries… luckily I can get them at a decent price from Pesty’s father in any quantity. I decided I’d start with 10 because that’d be enough to get the 2200 tested and the 700 running again.
Then I opened my eyes and realized that the 2200 actually has a 20 amp plug on it… and I don’t have any 20 amp circuits in the house. So I had to pick-up a breaker, 12 gauge wire and 20A outlet… then I discovered our panel at home is full! One minor hack and a dead circuit later, things were ready to test.
First up was the Powerware as it had the least batteries to contend with. It worked just fine. Bit of an odd thing – as long as it’s receiving utility power, the cooling fans are running. This doesn’t strike me as a bad thing at all.
The SUA700N came up normally as well. No big surprises there.
Continuing the success, the APC2200 also started just fine, and transferred to and from battery normally, but the meter was always flashing. Turns out it just need it’s battery ‘brain’ to be calibrated, which isn’t the most difficult thing to do, but it requires that the UPS be loaded to 30% (±5%) and that’s somewhat more difficult to do with a 2200VA unit than a 700VA! It took 3 Sun Ultra2 clones, a Pentium D, room fan and a combination of florescent lamps… which have a different draw once warmed up.
Popped in the SNMP card and struggled to get that going. There’s instructions on how to do it by pinging it with the IP while forcing the MAC on your local machine, but that didn’t work for me at all. Had to use the serial console to configure it. Handy thing tho. Not sure how I’m going to deploy it.
Actually, I’m not really sure how I’m going to deploy any of this stuff! With an impending new venture for Server North that’ll require a new UPS… bigger runtime for mWare at either Condor or Neville certainly wouldn’t hurt… Do I really need to use the SNMP cards? Everywhere I’ve got a UPS I’ve got a computer with RS232…
Speaking of run time, the other thing buzzing in my mind is gensets… (A gasoline, diesel, natural-gas or propane powered generator) If I get my own place in the near future, it’s a highly practical investment for me and my line of work. Combine that with the Matrix 5000 I’ve got in my garage, it could quite viably turn my residence into a half decent data center 🙂
More on that stuff later… it’s already taken me 3 weeks to write this post. Congrats on making it this far through it.