OT:Eaton UPS buzzing all the time

[Jethro]

We had a power cut this morning, and when power was restored, my Eaton
UPS (which powers a server) just sat there buzzing. Manual says this
means it's overloaded ... thing is I disconnected the load. Has anyone
any ideas ?

Typical, the one time you need it .....

[Brian Gaff]

Sounds like its under load, so maybe its bust.
I never liked them to start with. Only ever had one and it never worked
properly.
Brian

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"Jethro" <krazy...@googlemail.com> wrote in message
news:ygj8r.119983$dZ7....@newsfe08.ams2...

[Dave Liquorice]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2012 10:12:46 GMT, Jethro wrote:

> We had a power cut this morning, and when power was restored, my Eaton
> UPS (which powers a server) just sat there buzzing. Manual says this
> means it's overloaded ... thing is I disconnected the load. Has anyone
> any ideas ?

Do you mean it failed to cover the outage and just buzzed with no
appreciable backup power. Or that it started buzzing when the power
came back?

My APC unit buzzes a bit when it's supplying backup power but it's
always done that. What condition are the batteries in, they don't
last for ever even if they aren't used in anger very often. I get at
best 3 years or so from a set in my APC unit. Batteries in the UPS
box so they cook.

Has your power come back at the correct voltage? We had a short, 5
min, power cut late saturday night a week or so back. Voltage on
return was down at 220 and varied by 15v upwards. Just in spec. Next
night there was another short outage and the volts went from 225 to
250. Then stayed at that sort of level again with the 15v variation
and going out of spec (>253v) at times. Our normal supply is 235 to
245. The fun you can have witha UPS and logging the voltage... The
slightly worrying thing is that the customer facing part of the REC
didn't know about the fault, neither did the engineer who came out
when I complained, nor did his local office, only the operational
control center knew that the 33kV feed to the local main substation
had gone pop so we were on the 11kV backup as I had guessed.

--
Cheers
Dave.

[Paul D Smith]

"Jethro" <krazy...@googlemail.com> wrote in message
news:ygj8r.119983$dZ7....@newsfe08.ams2...

As others have said, sounds dead in some way. Always worth a regular test
of UPSs - we only discovered the battery was dead in one when the power
went. Problem is that the power test in some of them works by...

1. Block mains and switch to battery
2. Check how well battery is working
3. Report status.

Of course all this is bollocks if the battery is dead because the thing just
dies at step 1 ! I would hope that the newer models now just try to gently
draw some power from the battery but it's worth finding out.

Also, if possible, have it report status via e-mail or similar so you get a
regular "I'm OK" or an "I'm knackered" if the battery is failing - APC
models can do this but don't know about other makes.

Paul DS.

[Graham.]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2012 10:12:46 GMT, Jethro <krazy...@googlemail.com>
wrote:

Which model is it?
I had a brand new 3S a few days ago that was making a continuous tone
from its piezo speaker, and would not stop until I disconnected and
reconnected the battery. I am still not sure if it charged up OK
because the sparks on site had to turn off the power, so I couldn't do
the job I was there to do.

I'm still not sure if it was faulty or just too flat.




--
Graham.
%Profound_observation%

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo <ygj8r.119983$dZ7....@newsfe08.ams2>, Jethro
<krazy...@googlemail.com> escribió:

>We had a power cut this morning, and when power was restored, my Eaton
>UPS (which powers a server) just sat there buzzing.

It might just be loaded (not overloaded) recharging the batteries after
the outage. Give it 24h or so, if it's still buzzing then there is
probably something wrong. How old are the batteries?

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(")_(")

[Andrew Gabriel]

In article <ygj8r.119983$dZ7....@newsfe08.ams2>,

Can the buzzer also mean there's not enough energy stored to
provide power for some minimum duration (such as 3 minutes)?
This is how some other UPS's work.

This can happen if you don't do calibration runs a few times
a year, so the UPS only finds out the battery capacity is very
low when it actually has to use the batteries for real (which
it also treats as a calibration run). If the capacity remaining
is less than can supply your load for the minimum duration,
then the bleep is to indicate the UPS won't last long enough
because either the batteries are too dead (too little capacity
remaining), or the load is too high.

The capacity of SLA batteries in the cheaper UPS's seems to
decay linearly with time, typically reaching zero after about
4 years (3 years in some cases).

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]

[Dave Liquorice]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:36:23 -0000, Paul D Smith wrote:

> Also, if possible, have it report status via e-mail or similar so you
> get a regular "I'm OK" or an "I'm knackered" if the battery is failing -
> APC models can do this but don't know about other makes.

They can but in my experience the regular check by the thing going
onto battery for a few seconds every week shortens the battery life
noticeably. With regular tests 3 years battery life if you are lucky,
without tests 5 years...

--
Cheers
Dave.

[gri...@gmail.com]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:26:11 +0000 (GMT), "Dave Liquorice"
<allsortsn...@howhill.co.uk> wrote:

>They can but in my experience the regular check by the thing going
>onto battery for a few seconds every week shortens the battery life
>noticeably. With regular tests 3 years battery life if you are lucky,
>without tests 5 years...

Definitely. My APC Smart-UPS 1000 batteries have never been allowed to
perform the self-test and they're now knocking on for 9 years old. I
run an occasional manual test on them and the most recent showed them
to still have 90% capacity - which is ok, as all it does is perform a
graceful shutdown in two minutes, the battery life being plenty for
that.