Pre-emptive Failure UPS Swapping – How often do you do it ?

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We’re currently having a lot of UPS failures resulting in lots of down time to swap out the dead units, await for repair or warranty exchange and then more downtime to put them back in again. While this process happens we obviously have no resilience if there is indeed a power failure.

We’re looking at ways to swap out and pre-empt them packing up. All our UPS’s are APC of varying sizes, being networked which helps so we do get the alerts warning us of problems which is helpful. Our Hubs rooms are small and in lots of different buildings across the site, on average they contain 6/7 4U switches and around 3-5 2U servers. Some have dual PSU some don’t which is where we run into problems. Couple that with POE switches which run our VOIP phones and any UPS failure hurts us badly.

On average we get 5-6 years before we have to swap units and external battery packs. How long does everyone else get? Is the rule of thumb just to swap them out for new units after a couple of years to be safe? Or do we just buy dual PSU’s for every piece equipment we have?
 
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Dual UPS + transfer switch.

Are these rooms generally hot/warm? Are they all the same model UPS from around the same time? When not battery failure, how does the UPS hardware itself die?
 
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I've got a APC Smartups 5000i that is about 7 years old, only changed the batteries every 3 years or if the self check shows up a problem. Is it the ups hardware failing or the batteries, as my APC UPS's won't power up with faulty batteries.
 
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Thanks for the replies.

we set them to perform self tests periodically, they email to say the self test failed and on further inspection in this case was an inverter fault. Most of the time its batteries but we can live with that. Trying calculate how often to swap the batteries out before they die is tricky to calculate :confused:

The rooms arent massively warm we have dual air con units set to 20c :cool:
 
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