PCA Forums

I have a UPS/Surge bar for my comp that's about 3 years old. It used to work, it would keep my comp on for about 5 minutes or so. Last couple times I had a thunder storm or something and the power would dip, my comp would restart, so is my UPS dead? Do they eventually just die out and need replacing?

Far more likely that the battery is dead. Most UPSes act that way when the battery is dead. 3 years is all you can expect out of a UPS battery.

Not worth replacing the battery unless it's an expensive unit (batteries are usually around $30 and up). Not when you can buy a UPS on sale for $45 at Office Depot.

Yeah the battery would be dead, that's what I meant. Guess I'll get a new one, thanks...

yea i got a pretty old one. it is good enough to beep a couple times when the power is out. just to let me know it is dead

I think the Belkin ups on the wifes system is around 6-8yrs old
Never needed to replace the battery. Seriously amazed!!!!

I think it's because we rarely ever discharged it much, when power goes out we shut down the systems if not back up in a minute or two.
The deeper you discharge a battery the more harm you do to it. In renewable energy homes, solar or wind power, normally the battery banks are not intended to be discharge below 80% capacity. You can drain them way down if you want, but for longest battery life you stay 80% or above as much as you can. Also recharge soon as you can, batteries left discharged for awhile suffer more than those that are recharged right away. Course a UPS should start recharging soon as the power comes back on.
Drain batteries down to 50% or less and your doing serious damage with these little things in UPS's and not good for large ones either.

I think a big problem with those little UPSs is they don't really have enough battery to power the loads they are intend to be used with. A computer system that only runs 5-10 minutes on a UPS is killing the batteries by dischargeing them way to fast and too deep.

You can use larger batteries with a Ups normally, just wire them up as the proper voltage. Not that conveint though because they don't fit in the case. But it makes a great cheap long use backup if it was a good UPS to begin with. Just be sure to do it safely!!

My crappy power here has gone off for an hour or two when I can't shut down my system, like durring video encoding or capturing. Normal little UPS won't cut it for the time needed.
I have a rack mount UPS (got it cheap no batteries), 1750watt sinewave inverter, it runs off 4 12V batteries wired 24V about 230amps. Series parralel wired. 2 sets of 2 wired paralel double the amps and wire the 2 sets series to double the volts. I used good heavy wire and know what I am doing with batteries and such, hydrogen durring recharging etc.., my batteries are in a case outside and vented. Sealed Glass matts at that.
With this UPS system I can normally run over 2 hours and still be near or above 80% charge on my batteries. Depends how power hungry the PC is and if I need the monitor on etc..
Used batteries like new, not bad for less than $100 total for everything