Actually as best I can figure, the one that just died lasted *at least* 7 years. Of course, I had to disassemble the case to get it out, it was swelled in every dimension. woopsie.
I know this because I've been working at my current job for almost six now, and I got the UPS from the trash at my *previous* job. Only time I replaced the battery was immediately after picking it out of the trash. I pulled a batt. off the shelf in the warehouse and fired it up to test it, it worked, I told my boss what I did and asked him if he really meant to put it in the trash, he told me to keep it as he'd already ordered a replacement. Then IIRC I went to the counter sales guy, told him I'd taken a battery for personal use, asked him for an invoice, and he told me to not bother him with petty BS like that. That place was a LOT more laid back than where I work now :/ (but the pay was a lot worse...)
I thought that's what he said the prior battery did.
Yeah, it's two paragraphs down.
I don't keep track, but still I think I got 7 years once. Then I broke out the plastic ridges in the case and put in a battery that was twice as big. The whole thing failed a few years after that, and I've wondered if putting in a bigger battery caused that. ??
The simple answer here is to assess the quality of the current UPS and compare the cost of new batteries to the cost of a new UPS of comparable quality.
I have the same situation here, where the UPS that supports my garage server rack is an old but high quality Best Fortress 1420 (the good version with 4 digit display). This UPS is at least 14 years old and it's original batteries are finally failing. It uses two 17ah gel cells and clearly the cost of those new batteries is much lower than the cost of a comparable new UPS.
In my office I have a cheap little Tripp-Lite branded POS UPS that cost
Consider yourself lucky... I went many years without a UPS for my computer. Despite my rural location, we rarely have power outages. I've always used high quality surge supressors, and backup regularly, so I wasn't overly concerned about power surges either.
Unfortunately, power "fluctuations" are usually more of a problem than a total outage, and I've lost both hardware and data because of them.
The typical situation is during wind storms where a tree falls on a power line. It doesn't knock the power out completely, but cycles it on and off several times a second, or drops the voltage way down (brown outs).
The first time it happened I lost a power supply. My system runs 24/7/365 so it could probably be said the supply was getting weak anyway, but the cycling and voltage surges were too much for it and it finally died.
The second time the brown outs and power cycling occurred while data was saving to my hard drive and it corrupted the drive. I had to reformat the drive and (thankfully) restore from a backup. No physical damage that time, but a lot of wasted time rebuilding the system.
We had a wind storm again a couple of months ago, and this time my computer wouldn't boot up. I installed a new power supply, but it was still dead. I pulled all PCI cards and got it to boot. Then I slowly added them one by one till I found the one that had failed (thankfully it was a tuner card I was no longer using anyway). Again, not a major expense, but a lot of wasted time trying to track down the problem.
My computer runs non-stop recording TV shows, controlling our home lighting, we use VOIP on the network for our phone service, and more. My home business also relies on my computer being up and running at all times. For me, the cost of a UPS was worth a little more insurance of keeping things running when there are power issues. Or at least have enough time to save files I'm working on and shut down cleanly.
I chose a Cyberpower CP1500PFCLCD UPS for a little over $200:
formatting link
Of course, we haven't had any power problems since I hooked up the UPS, so I don't know for sure how it will handle similar power problems in the future. However, it has already recorded a few hundred "events", and kicks in to even out the power when my laser printers drop the voltage when they first kick on.
Yes, I think you understood my question correctly. But I really don't have any feel for the quality of my old UPS - it's a Back-UPS 650 IIRC
- vs. anything that I could buy new for a reasonable price.
However, I suspect that I am likely going to try a new battery in it anyway because I'm a cheap ba$tard, unless someone can recommend a new, amazingly good product that is available for, say, $300 or less.
I would go with a new battery. If your existing one is 12 volts you might try hanging a car battery on it. run times will skyrocket, and car batteries are cheap:)
Depends what your power quality is. At the office where I spend all my mornings, we were going through power supplies and hard-drives in particular at a ridiculous pace untill I talked the owner into installing UPS on all the machines. With the UPS units installed, computer failures dropped to less than
10% of what they were before. They are all low-mid-line line interactive units, except for the dual conversion units on the servers.
They've paid for themselves several times over just in computer life, lot counting down-time and lost production, or even agrivation.
There were some industrial properties nearby - and every time the bakery (Westons) started the line the voltage did strange contortions, and when some things shut down, we got spikes (confirmed by the power company when they put the Ganz analyzer on line for a week).
We are in a new building now, in a newer area of town, with less industry etc - but the UPS units are staying.
At home my systems are all on a PowerWare Prestige 1000, my wife's is on a Best Patriot 600, and my modems/routers/switches are on a Pulsar
500 line interactive.
If you know anything about UPS, these are all "senior citizens" and the batteries get changed about every 4 or 5 years, as needed. As soon as one of them reports a bad battery, I just go to my battery wholesaler and pick up the whole works at once.
I generally recommend PowerWare and I buy directly from the distributor so I can make good markup on them and still be very competetive. They don't waste a lot of money blowing their own horn like APC. And they WORK. Haven't had to scrap one yet. About every second or third APC I get involved in is non-functional even after battery replacement - gotten so I test them with "iffy" batteries before buying replacements. (Batteries the still work but are a bit low on capacity/run-time) My distributor also carries a low cost line which has served me well. (no failures, other than batteries, in something like 7 years). Powerware bought out BEST and absorbed Exide and a few other brands.
So I already bought a battery and it's working, although for what I paid for the battery I feel like I should have just bought a UPS.
For future reference, what's the magic decoder ring to Eaton's product lines? Really why I want to know is at a minimum next time I buy a UPS I would like it to be minimum line-interactive but true sine wave; preferred would be true-online... e.g. equivalent to APC's "SmartUPS" line.
Worst part is, I have a true-online APC sitting in my office at work leftover from a job (customer said "don't install it, our power here is the cleanest around" - idiot) but damn ethics won't let me just take it home :/
ADI around here is worse than Grainger... I can't even buy stuff for WORK anymore without having a PO first! useta be that you could just pop in there, drop my employer's name, pay with a personal credit card, and expense it... not no more! Plus they have a "secret password" set up for the company that changes every month... but when I only need something in an emergency from them every 6 mos. or so you think I know it? I'm sure it's for tax reasons, but they're becoming real unfriendly.
I'm not sure what magic words I need to utter to be able to buy stuff from them for personal use...
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