Comments | incorpore: Cheap UPS refill? (Uninterruptible PS, not brown suited persons with boxes)

incorpore

Cheap UPS refill? (Uninterruptible PS, not brown suited persons with boxes)

Jul 13, 2008 21:11

anyone tried replacing their UPS battery with a golfcart, motorcycle, or car battery?

according to this hardforum.com thread, it's doable, and cheaper and longer lasting than buying from APC or getting 3rd party batteries.

Any experiences?

Comments 4

gulfie July 14 2008, 15:39:05 UTC

No experiance, but a pair of questions.

Do you really need the UPS for more than a few minutes? If not, maybe just leave it with sad batteries. It should still power regulate and cover momentary blips in power.

If it is for work... well they can afford new batteries.

Depending on the size it may just be cheaper to get a throwaway supper cheap frys ups.

Or if you are looking at a larger installation : http://www.homepower.com/home/

incorpore July 14 2008, 17:34:41 UTC

Do you really need the UPS for more than a few minutes? If not, maybe just leave it with sad batteries. It should still power regulate and cover momentary blips in power.That's actually an unknown right now. The house in which I live now, and for about the next two weeks, has really bad power, and UPSs are freqently kicking in for brownouts (like somebodies running a vacuum cleaner or blow dryer), or for tripped circuits. The tripped circuits sometimes take a couple minutes to correct, depending on how dark it is. But, I'm moving, and I don't think the new place has such power issues (I guess I should ask ( ... )

gulfie July 15 2008, 10:08:43 UTC

Depending on the UPS they can often be configured to turn a computer off gracefully in case of failure. They may also be able to put them into sleep mode (eh'? maybe). But there is lots of gear that solution doesn't cover.

Modern consumer UPSes use gel batteries. I wonder if simple lead-acid one can use the same chargers. If so it might be possible to turn a few junk UPses pluss some used cycle batteries into something interesting.... and explodie.

incorpore July 15 2008, 16:11:41 UTC

My older (higher quality) UPSs all take lead-acid batteries; I have a pile of the batteries I'm hoping to take to the recyclers this morning. Supposedly those lead-acid batteries are very similar to golfcart batteries (which are hopefully not so 'splodie as car/motorcycle batteries?)