UPS batteries replaced
Almost five years ago now, Greg gave me a UPS he didn’t need any more, specifically a 3kVA Eaton 5PX, an absolute unit of a device which he unfortunately doesn’t have the rack mount kit for, and I don’t care enough to pay the exorbitant prices eBay vendors are asking, so it just sits loosely in the bottom of my rack.
The batteries were probably not in great shape when I got it, as it turns out digging back through Grog’s diary they were probably past their reasonable service lifetime when he gave it to me… and when you add in the fact that it’d sat, discharged, in his garage for a couple years after he’d used it for a few years, I was not expecting much lifetime out of it.
But I’m a cheapskate, so I put it off - it kept my modest rack online for about 45 minutes through a couple of different electrical works, which is more than enough time to ride out the typically brief outages we have here. However, last year we had a power outage that lasted several hours, and I noted that the rack UPS only lasted about 10 minutes… time to do something about it, but I wanted to wait until after Christmas.
Well… it’s after Christmas, so once my January payment came through, I set about chasing them up. I pulled them out and had a look. Lachlan, our solar guy, replied back that it’d probably be easy enough to just get the batteries through R&J in Ballarat, as they’ll have them as they’re super common. Indeed, they appear to be just standard burglar alarm style batteries… 12v, 9AH, in a super-common size and really common terminals.
Stuff driving all the way to Ballarat though! I looked briefly on Amazon, and I can get them for about A$40 each plus shipping, but Jeff Bezos has enough of my money and there was a strike on on the day I checked… Australia wasn’t covered by the strike, but I’m sure no scab. I remembered there’s an R&J dealer in town… one of the local auto elecs. So on Saturday morning, in to ask them about it and yep… they can order them, it would take about a week. For the privilege of not buying from Amazon, it would cost me about A$20 more, though they weren’t the CSB brand, I’m quite fond of the various brands R&J sell, having had a really good experience with them any time I’ve used them.
The dealer copped the freight charges for me, so instead of arriving on the usual Friday shipment they actually arrived on Tuesday, which is pretty great. After work I pulled the old ones out, meticulously connected everything up the way they were (they’re all in series, but everything has black heat-shrink… I’m considering replacing one end of each of the jumpers with red heat-shrink instead, though that might backfire if I’m not clever enough to not connect the same wire to the same battery?).
I shoved it back in, and ran the battery test and it reckons I’ve got about an hour and 45 worth of capacity at my current load. Not bad. Unfortunately the “it’s been four years, you should replace your batteries” alarm went off after they were out, and it’s not immediately clear how to dismiss that.
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