In message , at
21:47:05 on Thu, 27 Jan 2011, Andy Champ remarked:Slightly different technology, but perhaps your car battery was down to
10% capacity by the time you noticed it needed replacing.But you have a point, and laptop batteries also last only about two years if charged daily.
Perhaps the car battery boils off the excess charge fairly harmlessly, whereas the others get a more serious chemical change.
Not running them till they go flat is a really good idea :-), spike loads aren't a big effect.
Don't remind me, my phone battery is reaching the end of its useful life - it's currently needing to be charged every four days or so - and I don't hold out much hope of being able to find a replacement for such an ancient piece of kit.
One thing that quickly kills lead acid batteries, especially the gel types, is a poorly controlled, non temperature compensated, float voltage. Add this to running them at a relatively high rate of discharge on the few occasions they are used and it will will really show up any weaknesses. I'd budget for replacing them every year or eighteen months, then, as has been suggested elsewhere, using them for less critical applications until they finally fail. The limit would be about a hundred full charge/ discharge cycles or, as has been said here, three years. In a car, the battery is normally less than ten percent discharged by a start, which will give well over a thousand start cycles, as the life is only limited by other processes with that sort of usage. You can kill a car battery in a very short time (Weeks, not months) by sitting round all day using a laptop or other device that will take it below fifty percent charge on a regular basis, or using your car battery to power the caravan lights on holiday.
Batteries can still be bought for most phones under five years old, of not older.
I just this week bought a genuine Nokia new battery for a six year old Nokia 6230 ex-stock from the local fly-by-night phone shop. Just in time, too, the original was beginning to bulge.....
In message , at 22:15:35 on Thu, 27 Jan
2011, Tim Ward remarked:
You should be able to find new one on eBay (where I bought a 'new'[1] phone this week, after all the recent excitement/discussion about phone shops). Bought it Sunday, arrived Wednesday.
[1] It claims to be in effect an unwanted Xmas present and only used for two weeks - the vendor left all the data on it and nothing goes back further than that. Anyway I've flushed it all off now.
That's mind-bogglingly modern compared to mine ... yours even has a colour screen!
However, now that I've bothered to do a search, batteries for my 6250 do still seem to be available :-)
I've used a variety of UPSes both provessionally and personally over the years. APC is obviously a major player, and I've used many of their offerings.
I've come to the conclusion that UPSes are generally less reliable than the supply they are backing up, and are more or less useless.
You mught get enough run-time for the server to shut down gracefully, if you are lucky. Otherwise, the UPS may fail when it's required and dirty-shutdown your kit, or may fail when it's *not* required, and dirty shutdown your kit.
A pox on them all.
Others will no doubt disagree.
You can still get batteries for the wife's Nokia 3210, which is well over ten years old. It's had one new battery in its life and is approaching time for another.
People still buy mobile phones? What's the point? You can get hand-held computers scarcely bigger than a mobile phone which do email, web-browsing, GPS navigation and any number of 'applications' one of which is to make phone calls, so why would you bother with a dedicated device for just making calls?
I bought a new mobile phone last year because my wife ran off with mine on holiday.
It's nice and small, has luxury high-end features such as a torch(!) and even a colour screen, and the battery lasts several days, probably longer.
So far that's beating your solution in two significant ways - size and battery life. And you know what the real killer difference is? Mine cost twenty quid, including a tenner of calls.
Because you are only on a voice only network, and you dont actually want or need the other functions?
99.99% of my calls are from a POTS system anyway.Who, these days, (apart from public sectors workers) can afford to go anywhere anyway?
Why peer at a 2x1 screen when your eyss are crap and a 242 one is better?
My phone fits in the ticket-pocket of my jeans and can be sat on repeatedly without damaging it, is immune to being scratched and holds charge for nearly a week.
I neither want, nor need, anything more clever at the moment.
Because that's what I want.
In message , at
01:28:18 on Fri, 28 Jan 2011, Espen Koht remarked:
It's an interesting question. In this case I wanted to buy a gadget that was mainly a digital camera, but with a phone attached.
Now it's arrived I find it also has GPS and Internet (via 3G or wifi). So it combines some other gadgets such as you mention. The cost of running these may be a little high, though (it seems my daily allowance of data is only 25MB, and I don't seem to be able to plug my 3G dongle into it).
However, if I want to use a "computer", then nothing less than a "proper notebook PC" will do, I'm afraid. Even something like an iPad won't "do email" to the extent that I require. And I quite like looking at web pages that are bigger than an A4 page, not smaller than a credit card.
And while I can use my laptop to make VoIP calls via my home broadband, it's not the sort of thing I can shove in my pocket to make "mobile" calls with.
Anyway, I regard myself as an extremely early adopter, having for example used mobile data routinely since around 1994 (but only as a modem attached to a laptop, not using the phone as a display and computational device as well).
However, I think we need one more generation of screen and battery technology before I'll be happy to buy a 15" tablet PC/Phone that runs Windows apps and has enough life to be left on 24x7 in case a call arrives.
In message , at 22:44:47 on Thu, 27 Jan 2011, Ron Lowe remarked:
Sounds like you are buying cheap and cheerful UPS for £50, when what the OP wanted was one that retails for more than 10x that amount.
As for reliability of the mains, that depends enormously on where you live. In an urban area you might get one hiccup a year, often of very short duration. Go ten miles out into the country and my experience is significant breaks, several times a year. The difference is whether the power arrives under ground, or on wires competing with trees, high winds etc.
The general rules I've found which seems to have applied to all the (non-extended run-time) UPSs I've bought (APC, MGE, No-one el-cheapos) is that if you run them at half their rated load, then they'll last for about 15 minutes. Any load above that and it's highly non-linear, but below that it's fairly predictable.
So that's what I aim for - never run them at more than half the rated load - and change the batteries every 2 years or so.
Seems to have worked for me - so far!
I've just replaced the cells in 3 small UPSs I have - got them from my local farm supplies shop - 6 quid cheaper (each) than online for what I can see is the same make/model...
Gordon
Don't you think the fact that iPad/Android tablet devices have rocketed past almost two decades worth of tablet PCs in less than a year has pretty conclusively demonstrated that running Windows apps on tablets is a niche market?
I've noticed that too. But I see that there are special 'deep discharge' batteries which are used for things like powering rowing boat motors for fishing, golf carts, etc. I think the standard car batteries became much worse about 30 years ago when the price of lead soared. That forced a change to a new design containing far less lead.
What if you don't want to be reached most of the time, not by phone or email, nor make calls yourself, don't want to browse when you're on the hoof, don't want to be distracted by GPS while driving, and don't want to be subjected to the unknown whims of some app or other? And above all, don't want to spend more than 10.00 for any phone?
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