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Replacing my APC UPS battery

August 19, 2022 — Nico Cartron

Or how to save 100€ and be a bit nicer to our planet :)


UPS?

UPS stands for Uninterruptible Power Supply - it's basically a battery powered system, which will keep providing power to your devices, in case of power outage.

My UPS(es)

I have a small rack at home, with a bunch of small servers that I don't want to be switched off abruptly in case of power outage, so hence this UPS.

My first UPS was an APC Back-UPS CS 500, but it died 4 years ago.
I then bought a new one, an APC Back-UPS 700, which worked well.

But after 3 years where I barely used it (I got maybe 5 or 6 power outages, most of them being me shutting off electricity because I was tinkering with stuff), this one also died... or at least, its battery died.

At this point, I had 2 options:

  • either buy yet another UPS,
  • or find a replacement battery.

I was a bit pissed off, cause having to throw away a 150€ UPS every 3 years seems really bad, so I looked for a replacement battery, and found one at ~45€, shipping included - I thought "let's give it a try".

Replacing the battery

The 3 power sockets are located at the rear of the APC, and there are 4 screws on each site, so I initially thought disassembling it this way:

But it turned out that this part had mainly the electronic part.

I then tried sliding the front panel, and this worked straight away, showing the battery:

Talking about the battery, the new one looks like this:

Removing the battery from the APC is as simple as disconnecting the 2 wires, and then pulling the battery.

As you can see below, both batteries are identical:

Once the batteres have been swapped, all you have to do is reconnect the wires:

Then place the front panel back, plug the APC and let it charge for a few hours.

Wrap Up

Voilà! It took me less than 5 minutes to replace my APC's battery, and saved me ~100€, and I have a new UPS that hopefully will still work for a couple of years :)


Tags: Geek, IT


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