Here’s a tip for those of you with an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) or thinking of getting one.<\/p>\n
Today, while I was working from home, there was a short dip in the power but long enough to trip the UPS and have it switch to its internal battery to power the connected equipment until the power returned. The power was off for under a second but the odd thing was that both computers connected to the UPS switched off completely and there was a red light on the UPS.<\/p>\n
Probably not a good sign at all but I had figured that the batteries had given up the ghost.\u00a0To verify, I powered up the UPS again and ran a battery test at which point everything switched off again.<\/p>\n
It’s critically important to remember that the battery inside a UPS has a limited lifespan as do any sort of battery. Batteries will only sustain a given number of discharge and recharge cycles before they become useless (which will happen if the electricity in your area is very unreliable).\u00a0Similarly, batteries will only last for a given period of time when on standby and continually topped up (somewhere between three to five years for most batteries). Ideally, you should test your UPS batteries regularly or have the monitoring software do it for you and report the results. Unfortunately, this notification didn’t come through for some reason for some reason but will be something I double check when installing the new batteries.<\/p>\n