[Discuss] APC repair/replacement

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2006-06-17 09:53-0700 Richard James wrote:

> On Sat, 17 Jun 2006 09:35:23 -0700 (PDT), Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>
>> After 10 years of excellent service my APC Back-UPS 450 has suddenly stopped
>> working;
>
> If those are the original batteries, that's really good...

Yes and yes.

>
> APC has a replacement program, they ship a new one, you return the old
> to them. It is quite a saving.

Thanks for reminding me of that possibility.  I will check with them.

>
> I assume your unit has a serial connx, not USB, new models may not have
> serial ports. If your system does not support USB, you might be better
> off with just replacing the batteries (Assuming the power capacity is
> adequate).

Yes, battery replacement is certainly cheaper than getting new, and since
the unit has performed so well I hope all that is wrong is the 10-yr-old
batteries.

>
>> computer never went down due to power
>> glitches, but now it goes down for all of them for the same or even slightly
>> less (with switch and cable modem removed) load.
>
> How often do you get power glitches? I've only been on battery once
> since March 22, that was May 5 for 4 seconds.... (Mar 22 was when I
> upgraded my system, I could check the log on the old machine.... but
> it's very infrequent here...)

There are glitches (a few seconds) and mini-glitches (just long enough to
make both my UPS's beep once).  The former occur rarely, the latter occur
fairly often at our house (over the last 10 years of experience listening to
beeps from the UPS).  For example, yesterday, there was one mini-glitch,
today there were two of them, and all three occasions the one computer (on
the 10-yr-old UPS in question) went down and the other (on a 5-yr-old APC
Back-UPS) stayed up.

Thanks to the other respondents who had local suggestions for battery
replacement which I will check out as well.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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