They all seem to self destruct in about 6 months, I strongly believe that UPS manufacturers are in cahoots with the ones making these, they deliberately make it so their devices destroy the batteries.
>I bought an UPS
>Batts died within a week
>Still in warranty so free replacement
>Fast forward 6 months
>Batts now only give 2 or 3 minutes of backup instead of 30
>About 5% of the time the thing just shuts down
I will not be fooled into buying batteries every 6 months, I am on a quest to find a better solution. A possible solution came to me in my meditations. I would like to build a form of UPS myself using 500F supercapacitors, using a few of them should give me about 5 seconds of backup for my PC which is more than enough time for my home inverter to kick in. If I wire this to mains and then wire the UPS to this contraption, the ups batteries will never be used. I am severely mentally disabled, is it possible to build something that switches fast enough not to trigger the UPS, maybe under 10ms?
Irregular load cycling. You must have fricked up your set up somehow.
All I use it for is to give me 15 seconds of backup, when the power goes out my home inverter takes about 1-2 seconds to switch on, but the UPS stays on battery power for about 10-15 seconds before letting the inverter take charge. I have basically never used the batteries. The only reason I bought the damn thing is because my home inverter is too slow. Could the batteries be dying because I don't use them?
It's 1600VA, its got 2 batteries in series and my gayming PC couldn't draw over 500W.
My problem is that 5% of the time, it just shuts down my gayming PC and I believe that's because the batteries are dying.
Is it instant? If so, is your UPS pure sine wave/whatever marketing term? If not, your likely-PFC PSU could be misbehaving under certain loads due to the stepped power output. UPS batteries should last 3 years easy. I recently replaced 1500VA ones after 6.
They could still keep it going at idle for 15 minutes, but I had already kept them longer than one should.
It isn't instant, the UPS runs on the batteries for about 3 seconds while squealing like a pig before shutting down. It's the batt's fault.
Something is fricked with your system. I've been maintaining APC and Triplite UPS systems for decades as part of various IT jobs. Usually perform UPS capacity testing every 2-3 months, and we'd replace all the batteries in the array once runtime dropped to 60% of originally installed. Generally got 3-4 years out of a set.
I bought a cheap APC UPS back in like 2010, got lots of use out of it with lots of deep/complete discharges, and only had to change the battery once after about 7 years. The UPS itself died a violent death well before the second battery died.
>I bought an UPS
You should have stayed in school as well as adhering to the specs and limits of the UPS. possible you are drawing too much current, overloading the batteries causing their premature death. you cannot connect an entire power hungry setup to a basic UPS. they all come with a manual that tells you how much load you can safely connect.
pretty sure this is your problem.
buy lifepo4
>buy a housefire
No that's LiPO.
*lifeypo4
OP probably bought some shit UPS from china
The quality of those batteries is all over the map. The best ones I have purchased were powersonic manufactured in Vietnam. The powersonic mfg in china are noticeably worse. Your ups could also be defective and over/under charging them. They should last at least 2-3 years. Maybe buy a set from digikey/mouser/mcmaster and see if they hold out before designing and building a new ups layer.
>Batts now only give 2 or 3 minutes of backup instead of 30
UPSs aren't for you to keep playing video games when the power goes out. They're to give you enough time to close everything out and safely shut down the machine.
You want to keep watching porn in a thunderstorm, buy a generator you lazy turd.
My trash pick UPS will run my computer for about half an hour. I can even use my laser printer. Once I turn off the computer, the WiFi will stay on for almost a whole day. I suppose that the UPS has some overhead, and those big fans running must drain the battery faster than the WiFi modem does.
>My trash pick UPS
This. the best UPS are the ones you find in the garbage. Not sure why, but they always have the best batteries.
Lol usually the batteries are shot, and the people who owned them have too little time on their hands to bother with replacing the batteries. They get tired of the thing beeping incessantly so they toss them. A replacement battery costs around $40 to $60, a lot cheaper than OEM batteries, and a fraction of the cost of a new unit.
A friend does maintenance in this multi tenant office and the tenant will regularly ask him to discard the old units. He knows I hoard electronics so he throws them my way.
you are either buying crap batteries or your UPS is over charging them. some UPS's charging voltages can be calibrated (older APC).
Panasonic used to be the brand to buy but they stopped making them. powsersonics last about 3 years for me.
They need to sit charged at @ 12.6v
If they sit @ or below 12.4 v for several days they can start to sulphate and that's not good.
When cycling don't go below 50%
Sitting at a low state of charge before purchase can begin sulphation before you even use it i.e old stock.
I opened it up and one of the batteries had a lower voltage than the other. I popped the top and looked into the nipples, it looked dry so I topped it off with distilled water. Now it seems to be charging to a higher voltage and the UPS is giving me at least 10 seconds of backup consistently.
>Black folk bragging about 10 seconds of battery life
my laptop has 4 hours of battery and it's literally a decade old with the original battery LMAO
not sure what garbage you are buying, I worked for an ISP that used Tripp lite 1500VA rack mount units that would provide 2 hours to a typical site and our idiot management would throw them out after the batteries died. I now have 7 if them powering almost every room in my house after battery replacement. they even have expansion ports in the back so my rack can run a full day in the event of an outage