Several years back now, I was browsing around a yard sale over on Whidbey Island. Apparently some guy moved out of his apartment and left his stuff. The landlord, as is their right, was selling it off. Anyway, to get to the point, I ran across a large Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS). So, knowing how nice they were, and how expensive they are, I bought it. (Think I paid about $10). Anyway, It’s an APC SmartUPS 2000XL. One of the big ones designed for server use.
Anyway, when I got it home, I took some time dinking with it to see what it’s status was. Plugged it in. Started up fine. Plugged a lamp into the output, works fine. Unplug the input to see if the batteries will hold it up, lasted about 5 seconds. “Ok”, I thought, “Maybe the batteries are low, and it needs some time to charge.” So I left it plugged in overnight to charge. Unplugged it, 5 seconds. So the batteries were toast. Theoretically the rest of the unit worked fine. Just didn’t have the money to dump on four new 12V 18AH lead acid batteries for it.
So it sat. It sat in a storage locker for a couple years, then it sat on a covered porch for a year (even got a bit of snow on it), then it sat in my shed for 6 months. Finally, I got around to buying batteries for it. I figured to myself, “Well, if it doesn’t work, I’ll have some nice new batteries to power things when I go camping.” Turns out it was just fine. Opened up the case, clean as a whistle. Plugged it in, started up just fine. Whined about not having batteries of course, but started up.
So the batteries arrived yesterday, and I went about hooking them up and installing them. Fortunately, I had saved all the cabling and fuses, and the bottom half of the case that the batteries sit in. (In one of my fits of stupidity, I threw away the top half of the battery case thinking I wouldn’t ever get around to getting new batteries, but for some reason didn’t throw away the rest of the stuff.) Anyway, got it all wired up, and now it’s sitting happily under my desk, providing clean backup power to my office. Also, the load on it is so minimal, it’ll probably run for hours.
Here’s the photos!
The whole setup under my desk. Technically the battery box will stack on top of the UPS unit, but it’s too tall to fit under my desk. So batteries are on the right, UPS is on the left, and I put a sheet of plexiglas over the batteries so objects/pets cannot get to them. I’ll make a better case here soon to replace the leaning sheet of plexiglas.
Tadaa! New giant UPS for my office. Now my old UPS which is much smaller can go out and protect the TV and whatnot.