sundance-communications.com/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Battery backups

Liebert- I now work for a educational facility and the entire campus is backed up by Liebert. Solid units and nic cards for monitoring.

We have been using both the APC SmartUPS and the Triplite SmartOnLine in various sizes at our sites for quite awhile with little problems. We have had battery failure but no fires.
A good source for replacement batteries is Battery's Plus. They are under a corporate buying agressment so some things are cheaper.

The Liebert GXT series looks real good. But I suspect that unless you are a Liebert dealer they are not going to be easy to come by at a decent price.

-Hal

A good source for replacement batteries is Battery's Plus.

They gonna have that glued together double 12v battery with cable that APC now uses? They used to use standard gel cells but I guess they were losing too much money. You could get replacements from APC at 3X what it costs at places like Batteries Plus. Now that they "fixed" that problem you have to get them from APC.

-Hal

Hal, I don't know what APC unit you are talking about, but the glued together sets I've dealt with are either 12V 7Ahr pairs, 12V 12Ahr pairs, or 12V 18Ahr pairs. I use the Double faced tape pads that come with most block style phone jacks. The cables just transfer to the new batteries, altho some of them have to have the connector changed for size or type problems. The bolt-on fuse problem can be cured by getting the 50A fuse that NAPA car parts carry. Or else drill new hole in the old terminals on the fuses, several at a time. We get our batteries from (PM me for that, not fair to advertise on the site) and they are quite reasonable in big lots. The killer is the freight, so buy enough to make trucking it pay off. We've been buying groups of UPS's at E-bay and replacing the batteries. If you do that, make sure seller removes batteries before shipping. 1, you don't have the disposal problem, 2, saves about 40% of the weight! We have about a 15% throw away rate on the UPS's. We typically wind up with about 15-20 bucks in an APC 650 BackUPS. And they do hold up better than the plastic wonders. AND steel doesn't burn! John C.

The APC SmartNet series are good. You can buy the chassis cheap on E-Bay and put fresh batteries in it and be good to go. Have had few problems with those. They are steel-chassis with fan-cooled rectifiers. A few even let you tack-on extra battery packs (By design).

Tripplite makes some interesting stuff if you are going to do your own battery cages. I've had less problems with Tripplite then APC but still issues. They are getting hard to find as well.

I use a local company that sells Adler UPS systems. The only passive systems they have are 1000 and 1500. Everything else is 2KVA+ Active stuff. They're also not cheap.

John, these are the APC BR-900 series. They are two 12V/12AH batteries stuck together top to top with a (I think) 3 conductor cable coming from between them. That cable has a plug on it that you plug into the side of the battery compartment. I'm waiting for one to go bad so I can take them apart and see what they have done.

-Hal

A month ago we had a customer call with a down system. Anyhow the APC unit (I believe 1500) was dead. Two weeks later when we returned to install the new batteries (ordered by customer) became an impossible task. When we opened the unit the batteries had expanded so much that they could not be removed. Lord only know what would have become of them had they been uncased in a plastic housing.

IMHO Best make the finest UPS power supplies. Anyway; the place for APC batteries at about 1/2 of what the OEM charges is RefurbUPS. I have been buying batteries and refurbished UPS' from them for a while now and they are good to do business with. Hope you find this useful.
Bill

Have to agree with rustynails. Sometimes the batteries swell up so bad, dis-assembly of the entire chassis is the only way to get them out. Since I've inherited the 'UPS guy' title at my company, I've discovered that tearing them down and re-assembleing them is actually pretty easy. Practice makes perfect. Of course, Familiarity breeds contempt, too. We have a record of what most of our customers have and we just take out a refurbed unit and bring theirs' in. If all it takes is batteries, they pay trip, 1/2 hour labor and batteries and the unit goes into refurb stock. If it's fried, they get charged for the refurbed unit plus trip and 1/2 hour labor. But, they're happy to get that B/U in place asap. John C.