[Novalug] Can I test a UPS battery?

[Peter Larsen]

Most management console has an easy way to see predicted uptime. You 
should set your UPS to do a 'calibrate' test, which does, as people here 
suggest, a full load and then unload - and it measures how fast the 
batteries discharge.

2-3 years old batteries are OLD. If you have a management console on the 
UPS, it should have told you to replace the battery (there's a small 
parameter in the UPS that holds the age of the battery; when the age is 
more than 1 year this should start to trigger "time to replace").

APC has a great program; they'll exchange your old battery for a new one 
and you even get a small discount on the new one when you do it. It's 
"free" to send the old one back. Saves the nature for a lot of poison 
that way. For little single PC boxes, the replacement cost is about 
$50-100. Well worth it, if it's a matter of protecting your personal 
data from total loss.

If you don't run a monthly scheduled calibrate, meaning your batteries 
constantly hold a charge, that wears them down faster. It's important to 
drain them regularly. This is what "calibrate" does, and of the APC 
packs that I've gotten the last year or two, all of them are set to 
automatically do this once a month. With the management console, you can 
change that to what-ever schedule you please.

Bottom line - get your apc daemon running. Run the smartups (I presume 
it's a smartups?) management console available for Linux on APC, and set 
the operational parameters for the UPS. I know this goes against the 
"plug and forget" mentality, but it saves your money as the unit lives 
longer.

Regards
   Peter Larsen

Beartooth wrote:
> 
>     I replaced the battery in one UPS yesterday, charged it all night, 
> and swapped it out for the one on my wife's machine.
> 
>     Now the one she had, which will fit into a stack of three on my 
> desk, has been running two or three years, maybe four, supporting one 
> computer and its monitor (with the printer using it for surge control).
> 
>     We do have power failures occasionally; in fact, we came back a day 
> or two ago from town to discover we had had a half-hour outage. All the 
> computers were dead, of course. I didn't think to recharge the 
> batteries, but simply got stuff going again.
> 
>     I say all that in case any of it might be relevant. I tried googling 
> "UPS battery test" -- and got a mass of stuff way over my head, aimed at 
> sysadmins and others who speak hardware a thousand times better than I 
> do. It was all Greek to me -- if not cuneiform Hittite or hieroglyphics. 
> (I do read a little Greek at great need.)
> 
>     I want to know whether the currently idle battery has enough life 
> left to put into service, or whether it would be better to replace it 
> now, before I do.
> 
>     Is there a cheap and simple gadget I can use? Or would an ordinary 
> garage be able to test it for me? Should I let it sit and recharge 
> overnight, or test it as is?
> 
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