Labor Savin' update

• A couple of years ago I was given a UPS that needed a new battery . Guess what ? The battery I ordered for the hoist is exactly the right size for the UPS ! I'll be hooking the UPS up to my computer surge protector and the telephone/modem/router surge protector . We get occasional flickers in the power line , this will eliminate those annoying delays waiting for the modem to reconnect . I'm a-comin' outta this one smellin' like a fresh-baked apple pie ! <smells much better IMO than a rose>

I have crowbarred a LOT of batteries from APC UPS boxes.

You have to wonder: 1) What's wrong with the charging circuit that the batteries respond so destructively? 2) Why don't they design these enclosures so the batteries don't get stuck inside?

I have crowbarred a LOT of batteries from APC UPS boxes.

You have to wonder: 1) What's wrong with the charging circuit that the batteries respond so destructively? 2) Why don't they design these enclosures so the batteries don't get stuck inside?

======================================================== The batteries came out easily after I Googled the APC1400 instructions, which are to pry the top of the plastic front control panel off forward and unscrew the metal plate behind it.

FWIW, I've read that AGMs swell after one cell shorts and the others overcharge. The 12V 18A AGMs I buy used and keep as jumpstarter spares have never bulged from my intermittent recharging procedure but they do occasionally lose a cell to old age (5~8 years). The battery voltage appears normal during slow recharging but the current never tapers down below 0.01C at the recommended float voltage like a good AGM, and a load test afterwards quickly drops the battery to 10V. I use jumpstarters with Andersons as safely-packaged portable 12V DC power sources, like for my car freezer.

A few weeks ago the electrolyte level in my 2017 solar batteries was right where it was a year ago, touching the bottom of the filler well. Neither the APC nor my solar controllers, which are set to the same 13.6V non-bubbling float voltage, lowered the level at all. Measuring a clearance below the filler well such as the 1/8" that Trojan specifies is too fussy for me.

I've had to disassemble some UPS because of the swelling. You couldn't get anything between the battery and the struts of the frame. The old battery had swollen a half inch wider than the opening.

It's obvious, isn't it? You can't wait for a trickle charge for the battery, in case there is another outage . That requires a higher charging current. Add the high discharge current and you are abusing the batteries. A proper setup would use a much bigger battery, rated to charge and discharge at a higher rate than how you are using it. The telephone central offices float charged their batteries, and some battery banks at Central offices were in constant use for 25 years.

As the sealed UPS batteries age, the internal resistance goes up. That causes internal heating. When it gets bad enough, the boiling electrolyte cause the case to swell a little, each cycle until the user finally has it serviced. The same thing happened to the ole mounted UPS we had in Cable TV system. The cheap ass manager refused to replace bad batteries until they leaked, or they burnt up the inverter/charger boards. The few batteries he did buy weren't the right sealed, deep charge batteries, they were $29 car batteries from Kmart. Those lasted one or two short outages, instead of four years. These had a 60V, 15A square wave output that was similar to the pole mounted Constant Volt Transformer supplies that regulated the supply to the amplifier housings.

It's obvious, isn't it? You can't wait for a trickle charge for the battery, in case there is another outage . That requires a higher charging current. Add the high discharge current and you are abusing the batteries. A proper setup would use a much bigger battery, rated to charge and discharge at a higher rate than how you are using it. The telephone central offices float charged their batteries, and some battery banks at Central offices were in constant use for 25 years.

As the sealed UPS batteries age, the internal resistance goes up. That causes internal heating. When it gets bad enough, the boiling electrolyte cause the case to swell a little, each cycle until the user finally has it serviced. The same thing happened to the ole mounted UPS we had in Cable TV system. The cheap ass manager refused to replace bad batteries until they leaked, or they burnt up the inverter/charger boards. The few batteries he did buy weren't the right sealed, deep charge batteries, they were $29 car batteries from Kmart. Those lasted one or two short outages, instead of four years. These had a 60V, 15A square wave output that was similar to the pole mounted Constant Volt Transformer supplies that regulated the supply to the amplifier housings.

Jim, your message was dimmed out and won't quote, since you didn't delete the two dashes, followed by a space at the bottom of my message and above the sigfile.

It's obvious, isn't it? You can't wait for a trickle charge for the battery, in case there is another outage . That requires a higher charging current. Add the high discharge current and you are abusing the batteries. A proper setup would use a much bigger battery, rated to charge and discharge at a higher rate than how you are using it. The telephone central offices float charged their batteries, and some battery banks at Central offices were in constant use for 25 years.

========================================

When I was the Segway battery tech my boss was a former APC engineer who told me a lot about that business.

A UPS is a grudge purchase you hope you won't need, like insurance. As a result their prices and features are as minimal as possible, especially the low end consumer models. Design standards are quite different between consumer, industrial and military products, as you can see in IC data sheets. The heatsink may be just a block of aluminum whose thermal mass matches the energy it absorbs during one discharge of the internal battery, to avoid the cost of a fan. My Newpoint UPS shuts off after 30 minutes on battery, likely for the same reason. That's why they burn out if you attach a larger external battery and run them near full capacity.

An industrial UPS design like the APC 1400 provides fan cooling, a true sine output, user programmability and twice the load capacity for 10 times the price, $700 vs $70. Engineers don't like designing the cheapest possible products, they do it to keep their jobs, and the public usually can't judge quality and buys lowest price. The discontinued bulletproof Maytags that last 50+ years are a good example, another is that only a small percentage of Amazon reviewers can evaluate the good and bad points of the product.

Jim, your message was dimmed out and won't quote, since you didn't delete the two dashes, followed by a space at the bottom of my message and above the sigfile.

(-- ?) Never piss off an Engineer!

They don't get mad.

They don't get even.

They go for over unity! ;-)

==================================== I wouldn't notice details like that because I use Windows 7 Live Mail which copies postings verbatim. That's why I add the separator. WLM wasn't the first newsreader I tried when I changed from XP to 7 last April, but it was the first I could properly configure for Eternal September's servers.

Just because WLM doesn't obey the Internet standards is not reason you shouldn't assist it to.

When I bought a low end APC UPS I wasn't so worried about the maximum run time on the battery so long as it more than covered the time for the UPS notice of power failure via the RS232 connection to allow my Linux box to shut down gracefully and preserve data, continuous running was not a concern.  That APC UPS did fail when the battery died but I never bothered to replace it as all the filing systems I have used in recent years were journalling and didn't get corrupted if the mains failed, well JFS did but it was new at the time, XFS seemed fine as proven and now using Ext4 with no problems. I had used XFS on a previous Linux distro but swapping to a newer one it wasn't an option so tried JFS but not for long.

I use Seamonky with Eternal September. Thunderbird works with it, as well.

$700 was cheap, compared to what we had to pay for a rack mounted UPS at a CATV Headend to keep two computers based on the Motorola Exorcisor bus, and an external SMS disk storage (Two Shugart 8" drives. It was designed as a word processing system in the late '70s) system running. Each of the computers generated six NTSC text outputs to feed modulators. The 8" disks stored our locally produced program guide. One active, one backup. The OS was ROM based, so the disks containing the text files and configuration pages (blocks).

It took three of us to lift that monster UPS into the rack.

When I bought a low end APC UPS I wasn't so worried about the maximum run time on the battery so long as it more than covered the time for the UPS notice of power failure via the RS232 connection to allow my Linux box to shut down gracefully and preserve data, continuous running was not a concern. That APC UPS did fail when the battery died but I never bothered to replace it as all the filing systems I have used in recent years were journalling and didn't get corrupted if the mains failed, well JFS did but it was new at the time, XFS seemed fine as proven and now using Ext4 with no problems. I had used XFS on a previous Linux distro but swapping to a newer one it wasn't an option so tried JFS but not for long.

===========================================

I use the true-sine APC 1400 to back up the refrigerator and freezer when a strong squall line (today) or ice storm passes. Area-wide power outages can last over a week here.

I can see that would need a more serious UPS and battery store to keep going for that duration. In my location in the UK I think the longest outage I've experienced in the last 27 years has been about 1.5 hours and a couple of periods of low voltage around 165V instead of 230V -

240V which isn't suppose to happen but can but I know enough to turn the fridge off everything else worked fine. Is the outage duration down to ageing infrastructure or maybe a rural location? When I lived in the US outages were of short duration but I lived in fairly populated locations in New York state, Connecticut, and Kansas.

I can see that would need a more serious UPS and battery store to keep going for that duration. In my location in the UK I think the longest outage I've experienced in the last 27 years has been about 1.5 hours and a couple of periods of low voltage around 165V instead of 230V -

240V which isn't suppose to happen but can but I know enough to turn the fridge off everything else worked fine. Is the outage duration down to ageing infrastructure or maybe a rural location? When I lived in the US outages were of short duration but I lived in fairly populated locations in New York state, Connecticut, and Kansas.

==========================================

I haven't seen data but I think a major contributor is large trees that fell on the lines, especially in rural and older, less tightly packed suburban areas. Since the downed power lines may still carry 20,000V we can't all just go out and clear them ourselves. We like our trees, and their shade on humid 35C summer days.

The cost to remove trees from near roads and houses can be very high when it requires a $125,000 crane that can reach the top of a 30 meter tall tree on the far side of a house. I managed to split the bill with a neighbor when he wanted several removed, then sawed my three >20" diameter oaks into beams, lumber and firewood.

Call me cynical... but having to go without power for days at a time and the Power Company requesting a rate hike to fix it is very persuasive...

Call me cynical... but having to go without power for days at a time and the Power Company requesting a rate hike to fix it is very persuasive...

Leon Fisk Grand Rapids MI

======================================================== The big trees are being cut down, gradually, as the owners decide to. I've removed over a dozen.

27.60, 2x 13.8V, where my flooded batteries fizz slightly....

====================================

This explains APC UPS programming and serial cables in detail.

At the end it lists the native commands you can send using Win XP's Hyperterm. APC is unhappy that their proprietary language was reverse-engineered and published and won't help you mis-use their products in solar power systems.

$700 was cheap, compared to what we had to pay for a rack mounted UPS at a CATV Headend...

====================================================

You bought what the task required.

For a home backup system a $700 UPS that provides 900W of AC would be a very uneconomical choice to buy new, though a good one if cheap or free and repairable. A true sine inverter with a higher power rating but no UPS or battery charging ability costs much less.

The APC may reject generator AC and need a separate 24V battery charger. I certainly haven't saved any money with solar power but I can have electricity for the fridge all night without running a generator outdoors during a storm. Plus I like to experiment.

My system is adequate so I didn't look at alternatives very hard. Like the APC the inverters appear to draw idle power that is a large fraction of what my refrigerator consumes. Load sensing would help extend battery run time considerably by shutting down the inverter when the fridge is off but the APC won't respond to serial port turn-on commands when on battery power.