[Discuss] APC repair/replacement

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2006-06-19 13:21-0700 David Frey wrote:

>
> On 6/19/2006, "Alan W. Irwin" <irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca> wrote:
>
>> On 2006-06-17 09:57-0700 Anthony Howe wrote:
>>
>>> My work gets replacement UPS batteries from the Battery Direct place on
>>> government street.  It is located across government from the Vancouver
>>> Island Brewery and one block down towards town.  As far as I know we have
>>> had success with the replacement batteries.
>>
>> Final resolution of this thread....

Famous last words.... :-)

>>
>> Thanks, Anthony, for that recommendation.  They were most helpful over the
>> phone and as part of the deal they installed the new battery and took our
>> old battery for recycle.
>>
>
>
> How did the cost compare to buying a comparable, new unit?

The cost was roughly 60 per cent of a new APC unit with the same VA rating.
That new APC unit does have all sorts of add-on "features" (e.g.,
proprietary software, proprietary firewall (!)), but those are mostly
useless to Linux users or else virtually useless complications when all you
want is standby power for power outages of ~10 minutes or less.  The new APC
unit also has a two-year warranty.  However, I have already gotten 10 years
out of my old APC, and there is no guarantee that the modern units are built
nearly as well (in terms of long-term reliability) as those golden-oldies.
In fact, if I were buying a UPS, I would strongly consider going with a
reconditioned older APC model (which will cost roughly the same as a new
APC) because I have gotten such good reliability out of my old APC.

BTW, BC Hydro produces incredibly dirty power (as I like to say, good enough
to run an electric motor, but that is about it) so I do recommend protecting
all computer equipment in BC with at least a standby UPS such as is
available from APC.  I am convinced that policy pays off big time in the
long run.  Over the last 10 years the astro group at UVic has had many PC
equipment failures (mostly disk failures) despite trying to buy really
top-quality equipment.  Using similar equipment as recommended by the
sysadmin there, I have had no failures for that same time period.  In
discussions with him about the unreliability of his equipment compared to
mine, the only difference we can think of is my equipment has been UPS
protected all that time, while the astrogroup computers have no UPS
protection.  The other possibility, of course, is I have just been lucky
with my PC's (one of them bought 10 years ago and honerably retired two
years ago and replaced by a used shuttle box at that point, one of them
bought 6 years ago and still going strong).

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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