APC that doesn't beep

[astroboy]

I have a backup power supply, the usual thing where a power source (inverter) has the battery taken out and is hooked up to a car battery. The APC died so I bought a new one that emits a continuous beep when the power is out. Obviously, that was a bad thing and I managed to fry it trying to identify and remove the beeper.

 

I was wondering, does anyone know of an APC that doesn't beep, or makes a minimal amount of racket when it's running off the battery, that I might be able to find on ebay or some such place?

 

Also, I had the old APC hooked up to two car batteries in parallel. One of them I think I got from my father in law which was probably sitting in his garage for a decade or two, and when I  hooked up the new APC today I saw the water was pretty low, it was probably that way for months. Could a somewhat squirrely battery damage an APC? It seems possible....

 

Thanks!

 

Mark

[telegraham]

Was it a beep or was it the inverter whining? Another question...when the UPS was had the constant tone, was it generating power? An overloaded UPS can whine constantly. Normally, they won't be providing AC at the time.

 

I have several UPS units in my house that allow the beeping to be disable via software. Check that, and use fresh batteries. Confirm with a Kill A Watt outlet that you're not exceeding the output power of the UPS. Lastly, use fresh batteries. Fresh (less than two years) gel lead acid may be a better choice for indoor use.

 

Jim

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[astroboy]

Thanks Jim,

 

It turned out one of the batteries was showing only 9.5 volts, no doubt a cell was bad. Since it was hooked in parallel to a good battery at 13.2 V I'm not sure how much voltage was being delivered to the APC, I'll have to dust off my Kirchoff's laws, but I expect that is what fried the original APC I had. 

 

I got a new APC at Microcenter today on sale, rated for 300 W, I'd used 230 max, seems to be working great.

 

I dosed my tank on Saturday with chemiclean to get rid of some black cyan that I just couldn't get rid of and was damaging a nice coral (I hate to do that) and of course, with no working APC, we lost power 1AM Monday. Of course, with chemiclean you need to keep everything aerated to the max, so perhaps it was the fates punishing me. Monday AM I bought an el cheapo battery operated air pump and ran that with an air stone to break up the surface tension, power came back on at 1PM Monday, no harm done at all. I dodged that bullet.