Is it battery failure or just that the battery has degraded to some arbitrary point that it will no longer meet the promises made by the manufacturer? (E.G. The battery cannot maintain a given load for ten minutes but now only eight minutes?)
My APC unit is 1500VA (BX1500M) but works differently. The battery is a combo of two components that just slide into the bay, and then make contact. Video below shows how the battery is removed from shipping configuration and installed to operating configuration. No metal cartridge, no plug. That says nothing about the battery itself but I’m wondering if there have been tech improvements.
I am honestly dubious about the need for a UPS for personal use except in special circumstances.
Most personal electronics, PC included, can absolutely survive a power outtage.
A UPS will let you shut down cleanly but so what? You certainly can’t keep playing your video game very long or rendering your latest video. At worst you lose some time but is your power going out that often to care?
There are certainly places where a UPS is useful but if you are in that situation then you probably need one that is much more robust than is posted here.
Admittedly, I am not the typical home user. I have a network attached storage device, a 2 CPU/96GB rack mount server, and a firewall all running off of my UPS. They auto-shutdown on a power outage, leaving my ISP provided router running off battery for a couple of hours giving me WiFi internet during a power outage. If the NAS doesn’t shut down cleanly, there is risk of corruption and a disk scan on next boot can take hours.
How big is your UPS?
What will it keep running if the power goes out?
Is it meant to only be enough to allow a clean shutdown or keep things running for some time?
I have about 20 minutes of runtime with everything on. It powers the NAS and server after minute which gives me about 2 hours with just the router.
We get daily quick blips here at 6am as they are in the process of rewiring our neighbourhood, it does the trick for what I need.
I worry more about transient outages than long-duration outages. I am not looking for a way to keep working during a 1-hour outage. If I get a 0.5-second power outage my PC powers down. I have four virtual desktops with email, web pages, web development, video and image editing apps, several Excel windows, and a few Word windows open, plus Quicken and a PDF editor. Those are just the things that are usually open and used most every day. It doesn’t happen that often, but takes me 15 minutes to get back to where I was, and that doesn’t even consider losing any unsaved work. So yeah, over the lifetime of the UPS it’s well worth it to me. I just got sick of limping along without it.
Mine got very, very hot.
Dan
In the interest of factual accuracy, I want to update this slightly. The APC SmartUPS 1500 I have does indeed retail in the ballpark of $600 in Canada as I guessed (more or less depending on model and where you buy it) but I was off on the replacement battery cost. A good quality replacement 24-volt dual battery pack (not original APC) cost $100 last time and is now about $120. Still very much cheaper than a new high-end UPS like this one, with automatic voltage regulation, power filtering, and pure sine wave output on battery.
I also mentioned that the current battery “has been solid for maybe five years now and going strong”. Well, not quite. We had a short power outage here today and the battery is getting weak as the battery power meter was running down quite fast, so time for a new set. I checked my records and my last battery purchase for it was 4 years and 4 months ago. These batteries have a stated life expectancy of “3 to 5 years” so that’s pretty much within expectations.
Just a few clarifications in case it helps anyone. So again, whether to buy a new battery or replace the entire UPS depends a lot on the cost and quality of the UPS itself. This will be my third battery set for this UPS and it’s well worth it to keep this excellent unit in top operating condition.
One other thing to note about UPSs is that high-power ones like this 1500 VA unit will often have a fan which can be loud. Fortunately, the fan only operates when it’s on-battery or charging. I understand it will also operate when the load is quite high, but my loads are quite light. So it’s mercifully silent except on self-test or if there’s a power glitch.