When The UPS Fails
When Murphy’s Law kicks in, there is no holding him back. I had an UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) die on me at 11:45pm, 12/31/2012. That’s right. 15 minutes before the New Year. I may as well was having a baby! To add insult to injury the UPS was only 2 months out of warranty!
In any case, apparently we took a brief outage at the transmitter site and the return surge was enough to damage something in the UPS. The UPS in the other rack had no issues. How did it fail, you might ask? At the time of the utility interruption, the unit switched to battery power as normal, but when utility power came back, it did not switch back and the batteries ran out of juice.
When I tested and discovered this I noticed that I can force it back to utility power by turning it on and off. Eventually the relay that switched to utility will close. Yes, the UPS starts on battery and tests utility before switching on. Of course no love from the manufacturer except for the “we have service, please call….” I already ordered a new one. I may find a replacement relay and make the repair myself, but something in the back of my mind is telling me that some logic issue is involved and it is not just the relay.
How often do you relay on instinct when making repairs? I do quite often with great results. I’ll follow up if I do this repair do to boredom. 😉
Cheers
Tech Notes from the Field 
Bill, I sure hope the UPS wasn’t one of ours (Controlled Power Company) !!
If so, sincere apologies, and I’ll follow-up with people on this end … if not and there’s something we can help you with, please shoot me a private e-mail, and I’ll put you in-touch with the right folks here! Meanwhile, a link to our UPS products: http://www.controlledpwr.com/Uninterruptible_Power_Supply_Systems.html
Best regards,
Suzanne Hooley, Marketing Director
Controlled Power Company, Troy MI
Hmm it looks like your blog ate my first comment (it
was super long) so I guess I’ll just sum it up what I wrote and say, I’m thoroughly enjoying your
blog. I as well am an aspiring blog writer but
I’m still new to everything. Do you have any suggestions for novice blog writers? I’d genuinely appreciate it.
Suzanne,
Thanks for the response. No it was not one of yours.
I will check the link out and do some digging. I may contact you to discuss options.
Regards,
Bill
This does pose an interesting question whats backing up the UPS battery. Will we start to need back up’s for the back ups? could start to get expensive!
Jay,
And just imagine the failure mode of such a cascading setup! Brings a whole new view of “rolling blackouts!”
Bill