OT: UPS manufacturer

I replaced the battery in my hybrid car from one from a UPS:

Perhaps try one from there? They'll also sell you an LFP battery for £70 that has active management and overcharge protection, if the 30Ah size will fit in your UPS.

Theo

The IEC version is £100, so £85.87 might be a genuine Black Friday offer.

Yes, it is. And I have ordered one at that price.

So far, I have no need of a replacement battery for the car. I hope it stays like that.

Ditto, but the car _is_ 8 years old so will have to keep that in mind.

So is mine. In contrast, I have a SORNed Honda CR-V, and I run the engine to keep the battery charged and everything lubricated. If I leave the battery connected, it runs down within a fortnight, and needs a jump start. And that started when the battery was new. Disconnect the battery, and it lasts for weeks.

My car has stop/start (a so called mild hybrid) so uses the battery more, it needed a new one at 7 years old.

Mine isn't stop-start, and has an embarrassingly low mileage (less than

I use some jump leads and truck battery. Just make sure the battery is charged before connecting it to he UPS.

The standard battery in the UPS is only rated to last the few minutes it takes to automagically shut down and attached computer. For hours you need a BIG battery.

I have received the Eaton unit, and put it on charge for 24 hours, as instructed in the minimalist manual. It told me to go to an Eaton webpage to download the software, but the exact page did not exist. I eventually found the right page, after maybe 20 minutes floundering around in an unfamiliar website, which seemed to have no easy way to find what I wanted. But I found it, software for an Ubuntu 64-bit AMD system. I will try it after installing the unit.

Thanks for all the help and discussions, much appreciated.

One last thing. If the functionality is what what you need, Eaton are supported by NUT.

Yes, somebody mentioned that!

I doubt they are used very much. Most lead acids last a couple of years if they are in constant use. Most boaters are now using LiFePo.

Some smart chargers will retain a maintenance charge voltage of 13V rather than float at 13.7/8V They won't last 10 years at a constant 13.8V

APC's seem to fry their batteries. Capacity drops linearly to zero at 3 years.

We had an 80kVA Chloride Gaedor UPS at work with 14 year old batteries still in perfect condition, so it's certainly not something UPS's have to do, but APC are infamous for turning their batteries into consumables.

I concur with that. I am now charging up an Eaton.

Is it easy to replace with non-APC batteries? Will they will adopt the ink-jet printer approach, & put a chip in/on their own brand stuff.

I suspect it's not the batteries that are the problem, but the charging circuit.

In other news, someone caught Gigaset cordless phones red handed overcharging their batteries, and modded the firmware to fix it.

Theo

Given a small microcontroller with some ADC it is fairly trivial to design a circuit that will do any profile you want.

But maybe battery life isnt the big issue for the manufacturers

My handsets are C430s, the batteries show filly charged, just took them out and they're noticeably warm from being cooked.