C[omp]ute

From: "andrew cooke" <andrew@...>

Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2008 07:15:36 -0400 (CLT)

My UPS is about 6 or 7 years old (it's an APC Smart-UPS 420 and has been
rock solid - absolutely invaluable given the sometimes "unsteady"
electricity supply in Santiago) and the battery was hardly holding any
charge.

APC sell replacement batteries, but they are only available in the USA (I
bought my UPS in the UK, although they are also sold here in Chile).  So I
considered getting a new battery shipped, but that is expensive (they are
heavy).  I also considered buying a new UPS, but that seemed like a waste
of money.  Then I considered getting a cheaper UPS with the same capacity
and swapping batteries.  Finally I thought about searching for an
equivalent battery.

It turns out that the battery is standard.  A bunch of people make them
and they're used not just in UPS but in things like telecom equipment.  In
fact a company on the same street where I live (one block West) sells
them.  They're exactly the same size and capacity.  Replacement was
trivial.

A new UPS would have cost about 80,000; the battery cost 8,500.

One other detail - I checked my software.  Turns out that since I upgraded
to 10.0 the power management hasn't been working correctly.  It was using
the powerd daemon (unconfigured).  I swapped that out for apcupsd which
seems to work fine (I have vague memories of that not working a while
back, but they seem to have fixed it).

Andrew