Another APC Crapout

[n2ize]

Yes folks, another one of my APC "Power Backup" systems failed out of thin air last night. It was a "dumb unit" that basically just sat there and provided about 6 minutes run time if the power were to go out. Last night while everything was turned off, it started beeping. It seemed to be running on battery despite the fact that it was connected to a live outlet. Today I can;t seem to get it to power up for more than a second, regardless of whether it's plugged in or not.

I know I should probably just pull ou the battery (which is fairly new) and chuck it. But of course sometime today I'm going to have to open it up and get in there with my meter and see if I can't figure out why it blew in the middle of the night with no appreciable load on it...and if possible...fix it

All my other smart units seem to be fine. I checked the logs and they care clean, they show no indication of any sort of power incident that would have caused a switch-over during the night.

One thing I hate about these APC units is that they can be very temperamental. If you so much as look at them the wrong way they will sometimes crap out on you. When they work right they work great, they catch most power events of long and short duration and are pretty much maintenance free, except for occasional battery replacement. The thing is that I generally don;t like running a system without one connected. You never know when a momentary power failure is going to wipe everything out. Fortunately the machine that is attached to the unit that went bad is a system that is only run a couple hours or so per day.

[KA5PIU]

Hello.

So, what are the best brands?
I have a cheezy Russian UPS that takes everything and turns it to DC.
After that it is brute force filtering and a battery pack with something like 90 AA NiCad cells.
Charging is a diode and resistor or perhaps varistor.
But, it is over a dozen years old, and except for cell replacement, works fine.
Another unit is a Tripp-Lite that died.
It had a 12 volt battery that failed so I cut it apart and use the front section connected to a marine 12 volt battery.
300 watts but one hack of a runtime.
Since I now have laptops without exception here it really is standby power and not a UPS.
The DSL has a battery pack as well as the answering machine/cordless base/VoIP device.
I want at least 12 hours of battery time before I have to start a generator.
I know that most UPS failures are the battery and are simply replaced so this is why I want to know, I want to select from a good brand for my projects.