Nice little surprise in UPS or Battery Backup for eWaste recyclers

**IdahoScrapper** · 11-23-2013, 08:21 PM

Originally Posted by sawmilleng

Idaho,

Just a word of caution:

You NEED to know the voltage of the UPS you are gonna use so you can wire it right. Just guessing the voltage is a good way to toast something....probably in your truck wiring system. If you don't have a meter, borrow one from a buddy and put it on the UPS batteries so you know for sure what you have. If it turns out to be what you expected, no big deal. Then I'm an idiot. But you might find something you didn't expect....

Jon.

I definitely plan/planned to verify the voltage. Went out a minute ago with an analog meter that I am not even sure I had set correctly, but if I did, it looks like the pair is putting out 20 volts, and by themselves about 8/9 each.

Did some more searching. Found out these batteries are 12 volt. There's 16 of them. 8 in each "cartridge" they call them. Had this plugged in overnight, so maybe I have a weak battery somewhere.

**Phantoms001** · 11-23-2013, 08:46 PM

Originally Posted by IdahoScrapper

Did some more searching. Found out these batteries are 12 volt. There's 16 of them. 8 in each "cartridge" they call them. Had this plugged in overnight, so maybe I have a weak battery somewhere.

It's too hard to tell without knowing how they are wired and what model backup you have. The last APC3000 I took apart was a 4 battery 48 volt system. Obviously if they are all in series you have a 96 vdc system. I would shy away from something like that because the batteries are going to have a low capacity (5 amp hour). That just isn't going to be enough juice for any kind of sustained use.

If they are just running the 12v 5ah batteries in parallel to get 10ah and then is series to get 48vdc you could just put 4 bigger batteries in there. Either way 20vdc is way to low.