Weird APC UPS behaviour

[mubs]

I have an APC BackUPS BR-1500 with an attached extra battery pack, BR-24.

They were purchased in April 2007. The BR-1500 died in September 2008 and the complete unit was replaced by APC under warranty. The batteries in the replacement are dated July 2008.

Have had no issues so far. It has always kicked in when the power goes off, and has never complained.

I have the APC Powerchute Personal Edition 2.0 (no updates since 2005) running on XP. With the extended battery pack, I have always had a large amount of runtime available. When the power has gone off, there has never been an urgency to shutdown the machine; I have continued working for 30 mins and more.

A couple of weeks ago, it popped up a warning that the batteries were more than 3 years old and should be replaced. Of course I dismissed the popup. The very next time the power went off, Powerchute said I had 30 secs to hibernate and it hibernated the system immediately. This happened a couple of times.

The next couple of times, no time to even hibernate; the PC lost power a couple of seconds after the mains power went off.

Whoa! Is this like HP chipping their ink and toner cartridges to stop working at a predetermined time to "protect the consumer"?

Right now, Powerchute says I am drawing 173 watts and have a runtime of 143 mins. Either it's lying, or the firmware in the UPS is.

I don't mind replacing the batteries if they're gone, but to do so just because APC decides on a predetermined lifetime is ridiculous. I called their Tech Support and they insist they don't predetermine the battery life.

Power here is unreliable, and I can't risk corrupting data or killing drives, so I'm chickening out and getting the batteries replaced.

 

[Bozo]

I have had the same problem with APC UPS's. If you don't replace the batteries the unit will shut itself off and won't restart until the batteries are replaced.
I installed APC Powerstack 250 units in all our network hubs. (If there is a local area power interuption, the network will stay up.) Our clueless boss won't buy the monitoring software so when a battery dies, the UPS shuts off causing problems.

 

[mubs]

An official APC authorized repair guy came and replaced the two weak / dead batteries with APC branded ones for a little less than 1/4 the original cost of the UPS. Not bad!

But he wanted twice the original cost of the extended battery pack to replace 4 batteries in there. I said no thanks.

The unreliable Powerchute says I have 38 mins of back with just the RS-1500 and no additional battery pack. Plenty enough.

 

[MaxBurn]

Gel cells really do fail in that 3-5 year band for UPS systems. No surprises here.

As far as the shutting off feature, Emerson UPS systems don't do that.

 

[blakerwry]

As far as the shutting off feature, Emerson UPS systems don't do that.

So how do they run if mains are down and the batteries have run out of juice?

We have not found UPS software to be a reliable indicator of UPS health/functionality. In order to effectively test the units, we run the self test from the unit itself once per year and replace batteries on any units that fail. This typically equates to a 3-4 year replacement cycle on batteries. If the unit has 2 year old or less batteries, and continues to fail the self test - or fails to function during power outages - the unit is replaced.

 

[mubs]

I'd have to agree with Blake that the sw is unreliable. I don't know how to self-test my unit using its buttons; I do it only through the sw.

 

[Howell]

My recollection was that you could schedule self-tests through the software. Is that not the case now?

 

[mubs]

There does not seem to be an option for that. However, the self-test screen of Powerchute says:

"Powerchute automatically performs a self-test of your battery backup every 2 weeks and each time you turn on your unit."

There is also an option to run a manual self-test.