[GRLUG] Local APC UPS Repair

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Tue, 2013-04-30 at 09:49 -0400, Bob Kline wrote:
> I was getting at the last sentence - a car battery
> or deep discharge marine battery.
> But as I recently learned, one has to be careful
> about the type of battery. 

Yep, I've cooked a couple things in my time learning that.

> I suspect the actual solution will be rather more
> expensive.  One could imagine two batteries in
> series, with a regulator, which would then dissipate
> a lot of the energy in dropping the voltage so the
> inverter can use it.  Or a built in switching mechanism
> that will go from battery to battery.

'high' capacity MOFSET and other voltage regulators / current limiters
are 'inexpensive'.

> Of course UPS's are really designed just to give
> your computers time to shut down in an orderly
> fashion, so perhaps all of this is beside the point,
> and the reason no one offers a UPS with more
> endurance.  

I dunno; in the past I have kept computers running using multiple UPS
and cycling through them, always having two charging and rotating them
as they got low.   Even those not every powerful UPSs would run a server
for more than 30 minutes - I'd consider 30 minutes is a long time. The
limitation is just batteries - batteries suck [and despite a constant
stream of heraldic articles in Science Weekly about battery tech - it
hasn't really gotten much better].


-- 
Adam Tauno Williams <mailto:awilliam at whitemice.org> GPG D95ED383
Systems Administrator, Python Developer, LPI / NCLA