Which is why generally you shouldn't buy the genuine battery replacements.
E.g. that £97.99 650VA APC BACK-UPS linked above
The genuine RBC110 battery is around £60
UPS Trader has them for £15.17!
UPS for home network
- Thread starter michty_me
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E.g. that £97.99 650VA APC BACK-UPS linked above
The genuine RBC110 battery is around £60
UPS Trader has them for £15.17!
. Will await a new deal as they seem to dip in and out.I have one of these protecting my NAS drives, internet router & switch and main PC just in-case it was switched on.
It's quite small and discrete and saved my NAS drives a few times. In the event of a power cut it's use is to keep the internet up and do an orderly shutdown of the NAS drives when it's power depletes to a certain level.
APC by Schneider Electric Back UPS Pro - BR900MI - UPS 900VA
It's quite small and discrete and saved my NAS drives a few times. In the event of a power cut it's use is to keep the internet up and do an orderly shutdown of the NAS drives when it's power depletes to a certain level.
Thanks, I shall check that out although the wrong ends, Was looking for normal 3 pin plugs. I'm sure my work will have plenty of the others I can nab.
Just get a 4 way mains extension and put an IEC connector on it or buy one ready made from the rain forest place.
Good idea!!
Exception here is the 3S Mini, which I find quite surprising as Eaton pride themselves on rigorous engineering, though I don't know if they've updated the unit to fix the issue in the last year or so. The 3S Mini kills the lithium batteries in it within 1-2 years due to from what I can see a mixture of holding them constantly at a float voltage as if they were lead acid and problems with the over discharge protection.
But the 3S Mini isn't really appropriate here.
EDIT: I've seen a massive turn against APC lately - was always highly rated by people doing this kind of stuff professionally but seems they've gone massively downhill and stuff like I experience awhile back has become far more normal:
Seen people doing tear downs where APC have replaced good quality components in the older units with what is basically trash in the newer ones and it fails i.e. copper wire swapped out for aluminium.
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Makes sense on the reason for failures. We have them in not particularly nice places a lot of the time. They can get knocked around etc.
Never did get any feedback on why they were turning up non-functional. I replaced my own APC Back-UPS series as the batteries were needing replacing a bit too frequently for my liking albeit under the conditions a lot of UPS are used batteries do take a bit of a beating.
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I can certainly attest to APC having gone from respectable to questionnable. My own Back-UPS 500 from many years ago died for no good reason that I could tell initially. Ultimately in the end, it turns out the unit couldn't charge the battery up so it kept putting it on recharge and killed the cycles on the battery. And, that unit had been sent in for a QA check prior to being sent to me when I purchased it "new" from OCUK. So I suspect that at some point it was sent in possibly for RMA or Returns because something wasn't right. Got checked (not well enough) then sent out to OCUK who then forwarded it to me. Wasn't impressed.
Anyway, have since moved to those tower UPS instead, but not from APC after that experience, went with Cyberpower instead (can see from one of my older threads in the PSU section). Largely because besides the poor experience wth APC, neither APC nor Eaton provides a UPS with a battery that can keep 30W of gear up for 180+ minutes at the same price level. It's almost 50% or more from either APC or Eaton compared to Cyberpower. So (in my case) Cyberpower UPS became my default go to.
Anyway, have since moved to those tower UPS instead, but not from APC after that experience, went with Cyberpower instead (can see from one of my older threads in the PSU section). Largely because besides the poor experience wth APC, neither APC nor Eaton provides a UPS with a battery that can keep 30W of gear up for 180+ minutes at the same price level. It's almost 50% or more from either APC or Eaton compared to Cyberpower. So (in my case) Cyberpower UPS became my default go to.
APC always send their units out with an "engineers" verification checklist, hence my quoted post above where it was raising a lot of questions when we got a whole bunch of them with supposed QC sign-off yet turning up non-functional.
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Echo this, and many other APC related comments it would seem!
My own BackUPS Pro 900 went into protection mode once and I don't trust it any more. I'd already decided that it was a plastic piece of crap having previously taken it apart for an unrelated reason. It wasn't cheap either, £250 IIRC.
I've also seen about half a dozen of the bigger rack mounted SmartUPS units fail, one in a BIG way with sparks and smoke. I wouldn't touch APC with a barge pole anymore.
My personal favourite is Riello, especially the Sentinel range. I used to work for a blue light organisation and we had hundreds of them deployed across the estate and they were excellent. Reliable, dependable and with very few failures over many years. Pure sinewave output, active cooling, battery expandable.
I've used many brands over the years, APC, Eaton, Riello, Cyberpower, Certa, BORI... plenty of brands I'd use before I considered another APC.
I'll just leave this here... (I suspect this is what happened to mine)
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I bought an APC BX1600MI back in 2022, the battery died a few months ago. It was advertised as having replaceable batteries but had to be done by an APC engineer 
Anyway, I sourced a battery and swapped it myself, but I won't be buying APC again. It's a very simple unit for the money I spent..
Anyway, I sourced a battery and swapped it myself, but I won't be buying APC again. It's a very simple unit for the money I spent..