APC Back-UPS 1250 Died

[elgato]

I have a very old Back-ups 1250 that never did complain about the batteries but I replaced them because they were about five years old.

Replacement went fine, test worked fine and unplugging it with a 100w lamp worked fine.

A couple of days later I unplugged it with the PC on it and it made a PFT sound with a bit of a smell and did not fail over. It still lights up and provides power when plugged in.

I have not opened it yet to inspect.

Any obvious things to check?

When these things get really old is it just not worth putting in new batteries even though they seem to be working?

Thanks

[kc8adu]

Re: APC Back-UPS 1250 Died

might be a bad battery.look it over inside and get the batteries load tested.
i have seen several with bad interconections between cells that gassed and vented when put under a load.

[severach]

Re: APC Back-UPS 1250 Died

Back-UPS are the cheap models, not worth saving, and weren't even worth buying in the first place. A few models like the APC 900 had design defects. High to extreme quality UPS are discarded so often there's no reason to own a cheap one. I've got a OneAC in the closet that probably cost as much as a small car when new. There's more OneAC elsewhere along with APC Smart UPS, Minuteman, and PowerWare. I prefer units with Advanced Battery Management which makes batteries last a lot longer and detects bad batteries before a power outage.

If you had to pay for high quality it'd be different but they are essentially free + cost of batteries. It's as if people throw away $1,000 flashlights because noone ever told them that batteries wear out.

[elgato]

Re: APC Back-UPS 1250 Died

Back-UPS are the cheap models, not worth saving, and weren't even worth buying in the first place. A few models like the APC 900 had design defects. High to extreme quality UPS are discarded so often there's no reason to own a cheap one. I've got a OneAC in the closet that probably cost as much as a small car when new. There's more OneAC elsewhere along with APC Smart UPS, Minuteman, and PowerWare. I prefer units with Advanced Battery Management which makes batteries last a lot longer and detects bad batteries before a power outage.

If you had to pay for high quality it'd be different but they are essentially free + cost of batteries. It's as if people throw away $1,000 flashlights because noone ever told them that batteries wear out.

Our network had over 60 wiring closets with dual UPS's in each. I think APC's in general have a lot of design flaws and ere extremely overrated. Short battery life, over charging, way too many batteries that had to be pried out with screwdrivers. And worst of all total shut down following a power outage or suspected bad battery. I think we had as many outages because of APC's as they protected us from. I did not notice the cheaper Back-UPS units being any less-reliable than the expensive Smart or NET ones. We changed to Powerware which had far better battery life and were more reliable.

[severach]

Re: APC Back-UPS 1250 Died

I forgot my trusty PowerVar units. APC Smart are more reliable than APC Back but I wouldn't run anything mission critical on anything APC because of the sloppy battery management. They can't spend another nickle on parts.

Powerware was one of the early adopters of Advanced Battery Management and that's what is making the difference. ABM is simply the process of "STOP CHARGING FOR AWHILE," exactly what you do when you don't want to boil batteries. An ABM UPS stops charging and watches the battery voltage. A good battery will drop a bit from charge voltage then hold voltage for days. A bad battery with a shorted cell or consuming its own power will drop voltage below minimum allowable within hours at which point the UPS signals bad battery. The charger cycling on and off greatly improves the battery life.

ABM is so effective that I can run the non critical units entirely on used batteries. Every 6 months or so a UPS will beep for a new battery--no power outage required. A volt meter or even a warm touch finds the bad battery in the string and I put in another new used battery. I find that batteries in the same string that were identical and bought at the same time have vastly different times to failure.

Using almost free high quality UPS allows me to use free batteries too.

The real way to prevent UPS outages is with dual power supplies where both supplies don't go into the same UPS. All of my devices are single supply so I run everything through an APC AP7750.

Brands with ABM:
Eaton/Powerware
Minuteman
OPTi
Liebert

Clary, OneAC, and PowerVar probably have ABM too but don't talk about it as it seems a rather obvious feature that anyone who has ever operated a charger should know about. If batteries last:
2-5 years--no ABM
6-10 years--yes ABM

[ben7]

Re: APC Back-UPS 1250 Died

Nobody mentioned BEST ups' s?!

[elgato]

Re: APC Back-UPS 1250 Died

Best is another higher end UPS. We had great luck with them. I think most APC stuff is budget level. You get what you pay for. Fine for homeowner but not great for enterprise.
For us it was worth the higher cost for better reliability and longer battery life.

[cheapie]

Re: APC Back-UPS 1250 Died

Hmm... What about Tripp-Lite? They're still around, right?

[eccerr0r]

Re: APC Back-UPS 1250 Died

I have a Best Power UPS and it seems to eat batteries. I had a set of batteries that failed a bit after a year. I'm not sure if I just got a bad batch of batteries but that was unfortunate... In process of thinking about buying a new set of batteries for it...

By the way, any suggestions for decent brands of batteries?

[Pentium4]

Re: APC Back-UPS 1250 Died

I've noticed APC uses cheap caps that usually die in them over time. All I have seen in them is CapXon and Jamicon, so I would check for bad caps definitely. But be careful working on those things...

[kc8adu]

Re: APC Back-UPS 1250 Died

the plastic apc units are mostly crap.
older metal cased ones are decent.some have a flaw in the charger where mods need to be made or reprogramming via undocumented commands.
i use several apc and best units here on big external batteries.the apc units get a fan rigged to run in inverter mode.best already have them.
the 850 va best units that run from 12v are the best pardon the pun.
i did a torture test on the one at the shop by putting that whole end of the shop on the ups and pulling the plug.4 4tube shoplights,soldering and desoldering stations,scope,service monitor,magnifier lamps,old 16" desk fan,tool chargers.
didnt even get warm.after 5 hours i gave up and let it rest.
put a manual charger on the 8d truck battery to get it recovered sooner.