I Have The Power

Many, many years ago I got this APC Back-Ups XS 1300. Ever since then I have had to bear the detestable curse of owning it.

You see, a UPS is supposed to reduce the frequency of disruptions from power glitches. However, APC made two critical errors when designing this particular unit.

The first error is that they did not include any sort of battery health monitoring and reporting. Their suggested method for determining the health of the battery was "unplug the unit from the wall and observe if the output shuts off earlier than expected".

When the regular monitoring of the status of your UPS involves abruptly cutting off power to the attached loads, you know something has already gone very, very wrong. But it gets worse than that.

You see, the second error they made was in what the UPS does when the battery doesn't (and/or can't) hold sufficient charge to even begin to power the attached load, a situation that is guaranteed to occur with some regularity due to the insanity of the battery test procedure.

For context, a regular power supply on most modern wall-powered equipment can continue to supply power to the system it's integrated with across momentary power line blips, or reasonable voltage sags.

However, when the APC UPS detects even the slightest blip or sag, it jumps into action and attempts to transfer the load to battery, only to discover that the battery can't power the load, at which point it goes into shutdown and switches off the output.

So the UPS basically takes a perfectly survivable power blip and turns it into a hard power cut to the attached systems. Fucking brilliant. Only APC could design a UPS that interrupts the power MORE than if the load had been plugged into the wall directly.

Thankfully the solution to this is simple.

We replace the UPS with one that is hopefully not designed by complete mouth-breathing imbeciles. Hopefully.

This new model is packing a bunch of lithium batteries rather than relying on lead acid cells. I'm hoping this means it'll last longer than the few short years that the SLA batteries in the old unit would.

But I suppose only time will tell. Honestly, though, the only thing I really care about with this UPS is not having my clock radio lose its time whenever the power drops for a few seconds.