[Novalug] UPS battery life (fwd)

[Moe]

Fang

Just for the record ...

I have three computers doing different things.  In common they have:
   1. Each its own separate UPS
   2. Each turned on once and left on until the cows come home or 
      until they need to be worked upon in an un-powered state.
   3. Our little hilltop castle suffers few, but greater than zero 
      outages lasting longer than the battery charge can sustain. 
      I'm guessing, but it may be once every "several" years. Rare.
   4. I bought my UPSs on eBay with dead batteries, replaced the 
      "dead" with "new" (Wellington Battery Co.) in early 2001, 
      replaced them again in late 2006, and expect to replace them 
      again in 2011. The first set were Taiwan, the second China.
   5. The UPSs do not do much cycling.  Occasionally I notice that 
      VEPCO has dropped power for two cycles (1/30 sec)(so they can 
      send a message, I believe).  I only know this because the UPS 
      I am near goes into battery mode for circa 30 seconds -- I do 
      not see the lights flick, nor do I see any other evidence of 
      this "blink".
   6. The up-side of this mode is no inrush current stress once a 
      day.  No daily (or more) discharge-recharge cycle.  In winter, 
      the "sleep" power consumed helps heat the house :)  Ete, sea.
   7. The down-side is a lost hard disk that had been running out of 
      habit two years longer that it really wanted to, but it did 
      not decide to fail until I shut down the computer last winter 
      and it had a chance to cool down and realize it was dead.
   8. YMMV.

Moe

------
 
Beartooth wrote:
> 
>         It being the depths of closed hunting seasons for most of
> us, the hunting list I'm on last week got to talking trolling
> motors, and their batteries, for boats; this guy makes his living
> doing off-grid energy sources. I asked him about UPS batteries;
> he repeated the standard advice to replace them every two years;
> and I summarized the two schools of thought on this list about
> that. The authoritative answer seems to be that both are right --
> in their respective contexts :
>