UPS battery dry

[asavage]

Yesterday, and again last night, the power glitched here. This is no unusual event, but I have three UPS units feeding three computers and about 15 other peripheral equipment devices, and the UPS for the forum's server didn't work. That led to the server's disk0 spinning down on the afternoon of 05-Dec. When I came home, I found it locked up, went "hmmm" to myself, and rebooted it, all seemed OK. No data lost.

At 4:58am this morning, I heard it rebooting, and went to investigate. Logs for the other UPS showed a power outage of just over a second, but not the UPS feeding the forum server. I simulated a power outage on that server (yanked the AC cord!) and it died. Data was lost this time, at least one post I'd made Monday night was gone from the database, that's how I know.

I run these UPS on external oversized batteries (ie Costco trawling deep-cycle batteries). They're well buried and hard to get to, but I dragged them out tonight, and they were all low on water. Added distilled water, it's charging now. I'll load check it tomorrow, but I may have to buy another battery -- over the past six years, I've averaged two years per battery (Costco/Johnson Controls batteries are pretty crappy), and two of these are right at two years, so it's probably time for me to buy some new ones. But not until January, this month's budget is totally blown!

Most of my power outtages are under three seconds here, though two or three times/yr I'll lose power from 30 mins to three hours -- I down all the equipment in those cases, none of my UPSs are rated for that kind of duty cycle. I used to run a giant 3.1Kva UPS (it used four Group 27 batteries and rolled around on casters; for a test, I ran a load of laundry in my front-load washer runnig on it, it would barely pull the spin cycle startup, but ran fine otherwise) but it's too noisy and generated WAY too much heat to keep at home. These little <1000Kva units are silent when not in use, but I can't run them for very long or they overheat.

Anyway, if you posted Mon. night and your post is gone, I apologize. I'll look into doing a cron job on the database and try to flush it to disk every so often, but I'm not eBay or Amazon, this is only a hobby!

[asavage]

Hmmm. I just found some 4.5 yr old pics of my old Best 3.1Kva space heater . . . er, I mean "UPS". It was of the FerrUPS series. I bought two of them from a liquidator, both with toasted batteries that were quite expensive. I converted them to use four Costco Group 27 batteries instead, with one of the four residing outside of the main cabinet. These things were heavy! Slipping a bit into blog mode then . . .









The FerrUPS are online UPS, meaning they regen the AC output continuously. It runs hot, and generates a lot of heat in the surroundings. The reason I eventually sold them off is due to that heat. But it worked very, very well.

[glenlloyd]

Al....are you sure picture #2 isn't a clothes dryer?

sa

[asavage]

See the cabinet to the left of the dryer? The one on casters?

It weighs about x2.5 the dryer, too.

Anyway, I sold them both years ago. Fun while I had them. Strangely enough, I still have the prototype serial communications cable I built for one of them. It's been in the bottom of a toolbox in the back of my van for six years.

[glenlloyd]

Sorry...my lcd on this gateway is too dark, and adjusting the brightness doesn't affect the browser brightness...missed the box on casters!

SA

[asavage]

Click on the picture, you'll get a larger picture, where it's more obvious.

It's not a great picture. I'm not a good photographer, and I've had a string of not-very-good cameras over the years.