3.7KW - christ how do you lift it, it weighs nearly 100KG! and yes, you could easily run most ovens off it for a while!!
If you only want to protect the boiler, phone, router and AP, then it would be far far far cheaper to just buy a new UPS!
What you have, is a £1700 whopper! designed to protect a small village...well maybe not, but it is FAR in excess of what you need!
Sparks...
I have always had good results with APC kit. I have only ever found one that had a battery leak - then only fairly minor, discovered on replacing the battery. All the others I have used have done long and faithfull service without incident.
If you buy the official replacement packs they usually come with a carton for returning the old one. They are usually five times the price of CPC though.
Aren't the spade connectors on APC batteries a different size to "standard" batteries to encourage punters to buy the APC branded replacements? Gary
And I wouldn't trust APC kit as far as I could throw it. I've never had a project with APC kit where they _haven't_ failed in a manner that boiled the battery and dumped acid either onto the client's carpet, or into a 19" rack cab full of kit.
They're larger, but nothing that wasn't solvable by closing up the female connector a bit with a pair of pliers.
Other issues are that you probably won't be able to reset the battery change date, and that you must do a recalibration run after a full charge, or the UPS won't know the battery capacity has increased (if it's one of their more intelligent models).
Erm, with an UPS, isn't it the case that the batteries should hardly ever be "cycled", but be fully charged almost all the time?
Yeah, right. Come on Nige, I normally agree with you, but on this, no!
Andrew Gabriel wrote: ... snipped
... snipped
Now that's what I call DIY, I think SWMBO might complain ;-)
(sorry, back to the topic)
yep, its only in a power cut they get cycled. Hence you can use car batts on UPSes. They wont last as long as deep cycle batteries. And used working car batts r cheap... its a costcut option anyway.
Yep. Done it. The downside is they look completely unprofessional and arent all solidly held together like commercial batts. Lead acid technology is very basic. Any book on lead acids I've ever read has complicated the s*1t out of it, and coincidentally, has been sponsored by a battery manufacturer, ie its purpose is basically to dissuade people from making their own for peanuts.
NT
Before the modern plastic battery weren't they sealed by pouring bitumen into the top and this could be removed to repair the battery? Hence the reason for sealed plastic things at large cost.
Prior to around 1940, there were plenty of dismantlable ones used for valve radios. Any book of that time on radios will include lots of details on caring for lead acid cells, including replacing the electrolite, plates, cleaning out the sludge, etc. Normally you took them back to the shop for charging and maintenance, but lots of people DIY'ed it. Actually, we had lots of them at school of the rectangular glass tank type, where you could lift off the top with the plates for maintenance. I think they all got chucked out and replaced with mains power supplies quite soon after I arrived though.
No it isn't. I once built a machine to test the machine that made the plastic that went into the bags that kept the electrodes apart. Even my machine was pretty tweaky, and the clever polymer science that goes into those separator bags is _very_ impressive. So we've moved some way from Leclanche's day.
Permeable separators is why modern batteries (last 15 years) last twice as long as they did 25 years ago. It's also one reason why "Batt-aid" no longer works, as they're pretty much already guarded against the failure mode that might have fixed.
Plain lead is also a poor material to make electrodes out of. If you must do this, recycle old battery plates and use a much better alloy. Battery lifetime also depends on the condition of the peroxide layer on the plate surface, so read something like the Caswell's plating handbook on how to establish this properly, don't just bung metal plates in and hope.
First they were separate glass bottles in wooden cases, then they were multi-hole rubber batteries, then they were plastic. Bitumen is still used with hard rubber (if you ever see one), plastic has always been sealed with heat-welded plastic (probably ultrasound welded these days).
My dad's MG (1932) has glass and wooden case batteries that are at least
55 years old. They've been dry stored since new and only rarely do they have the acid put back in them (and drained out afterwards) They're still in good order.
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If you sealed them they would burst. The water content in the electrolyte generates H2 and O2. In more modern times there is the gel cell, catalytic balls and so on, but if you make your own you must not seal them.
Any lead acid cell can be opened to work on it: how convenient it is is another matter, varies depending on construction.
NT
"Batt-aid"
But none of this is necessary. Making your own lead acids is very simple. Yes you can get into plate separators, phosphoric acid, gel cells, catalysts balls, chemically preprocessed plates etc, but none of that is needed. A lead acid cell can be as simple as lead sheet, acid, and container, and work happily.
tend to be tainted with impurities, or be falling apart.
handbook
It works.
NT
My experience with car batteries says they last no longer these days than they did 40 years ago. BMW battery - made by Bosch - exactly 3 years. Just enough for the car warranty. On my old Rover, which I've had for over 15 years, again 3 years or so regardless of make. And modern car charging systems should be kinder to batteries than dynamos were.
I'd say they design the separators to self destruct at this age.
Not my experience. My last two cars were Fords brought new, and neither has needed a new battery in the 8 years I kept them (ignoring one which needed a new battery after 2 days because it had been dropped and the acid drained out through a crack).
Battery life could easily be affected by the quality of alternator used. Long after most cars had switched from dynamos to alternators, some 20 years ago Citroens were using a funny hybrid -- an alternator without the semiconductor voltage regulation, with an external dynamo relay control box. Those went through car batteries quite fast, probably due to crappy charging voltage regulation.
"Batt-aid"
charging
Battery life depends on charge voltage, charge rate, what the alternator gives out at idle, whether the car is used after dark much, battery maintenance, alternator set voltage...
I've seen one car eat batteries every 3 yrs (bmw), and another run happily on the same battery for 15.
NT
Perhaps it depends on car use? My commute is pretty short by most standards - only about 3 miles. In the morning it tends to be a quick journey being before rush hour, but slower in the evening. However, it's certainly long enough to keep the battery charged.
However, when the Rover was the main car I was doing a much longer commute
- about 10 miles. But 3 years was again the average.
I built a solid state regulator for my last dynamo equipped car - an Austin 1800 - and that worked well.
It's also related to the physical installation of the battery.
In article , Simon Barr writes
Normally, I'd agree with you, having happily installed and used a lot of APC kit, but we had an APC Smart UPS 2200 boil its external battery pack last week. Fortunately, we smelt something getting hot and caught it before it could leak everywhere. The batteries are badly distorted.
It's only just over two years old, and APC refused a warranty claim.
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