Haven't posted much here, but have been reading alot and picking up all kinds of great tidbits from most areas of the fora, thanks to all of you who keep this
great font of info going...
Anyway, I've got 4 Smart-UPS's, (one 1000, two 1400s and a 1500), all of which I've modified to run with external batteries. One of the units used to overheat its pair of batteries, until I applied a circuit modification found on badcaps.net to lower the float voltage (don't have the thread handy at the moment), which worked like a charm. However, of all the UPSs, this one has the longest cabling to the batteries, made from a scrounged pair of jumper cables, using about 8' or so of what is ,I think, 10 AWG fine strand wire.
This is also the only UPS that ocassionally displays a row of blinking leds (the ones that show over the battery icon) - they will just occasionally start blinking, (all 5 of 'em) for no apparent reason, and for a varying length of time, kind of like what they do while doing a self test except no load is being supplied to the batteries (don't hear the inverter starting up and no other leds change state and the load leds show just a light load (only first led is lit). I quess I'll try shortening the cabling if I can't think of any thing else to try.
Just wondering does this ring a bell with anyone?
Just as a data point I thought I would mention that I've previously used wet storage batteries with my UPSs, but was cured of that when I had a pair of deep cycle batteries explode. I'd had them about a year and a half when one evening I heard a rather loud report from the computer room, and I found the top of the case cracked and the batteries low on electrolyte, so topped up with DW and figured that to be the reason; I used 'em another couple months, keeping an eye on the water level, until the evening when they exploded again; but, this time it was like a shotgun blast, it shook the whole house! Sprayed acid all around and this time the case was cracked down below the water level and leaking acid so I gave up on using wet batteries.
I expect it was a defectively made battery with an intermittent connection inside, but the warranty was up on them, and of course the vendor said they're not responsible. So, just thought I'd suggest for anyone who's maybe using wet batteries that you may want to somehow ensure that the acid will be contained if something like that does happen; some guy has since warned me that dry- and gel-cell batteries can also make quite a mess if they get a direct lightning strike, but I've not really done a whole lot to protect against that, so far.
Sorry to be so long-winded. Anyone else had batteries blow up on them?
great font of info going...
Anyway, I've got 4 Smart-UPS's, (one 1000, two 1400s and a 1500), all of which I've modified to run with external batteries. One of the units used to overheat its pair of batteries, until I applied a circuit modification found on badcaps.net to lower the float voltage (don't have the thread handy at the moment), which worked like a charm. However, of all the UPSs, this one has the longest cabling to the batteries, made from a scrounged pair of jumper cables, using about 8' or so of what is ,I think, 10 AWG fine strand wire.
This is also the only UPS that ocassionally displays a row of blinking leds (the ones that show over the battery icon) - they will just occasionally start blinking, (all 5 of 'em) for no apparent reason, and for a varying length of time, kind of like what they do while doing a self test except no load is being supplied to the batteries (don't hear the inverter starting up and no other leds change state and the load leds show just a light load (only first led is lit). I quess I'll try shortening the cabling if I can't think of any thing else to try.
Just wondering does this ring a bell with anyone?
Just as a data point I thought I would mention that I've previously used wet storage batteries with my UPSs, but was cured of that when I had a pair of deep cycle batteries explode. I'd had them about a year and a half when one evening I heard a rather loud report from the computer room, and I found the top of the case cracked and the batteries low on electrolyte, so topped up with DW and figured that to be the reason; I used 'em another couple months, keeping an eye on the water level, until the evening when they exploded again; but, this time it was like a shotgun blast, it shook the whole house! Sprayed acid all around and this time the case was cracked down below the water level and leaking acid so I gave up on using wet batteries.
I expect it was a defectively made battery with an intermittent connection inside, but the warranty was up on them, and of course the vendor said they're not responsible. So, just thought I'd suggest for anyone who's maybe using wet batteries that you may want to somehow ensure that the acid will be contained if something like that does happen; some guy has since warned me that dry- and gel-cell batteries can also make quite a mess if they get a direct lightning strike, but I've not really done a whole lot to protect against that, so far.
Sorry to be so long-winded. Anyone else had batteries blow up on them?
Comment