My ups is not working properly....

[Arunava Mukherjee]

My ups is not working properly....whenever there is a power cut my pc shuts down imediately.so can i repair the old ups or do i need to buy a new one????

 

[jkhoward]

Generally repairing/replacing a UPS battery is just as expensive as buying a new unit. Odds are that the battery is no longer holding its charge. I would first see if the battery is still under warranty through the manufacturer. If it is, they should replace it free of charge.

 

[Solandri]

Disagree with jkhoward. Many UPSes use regular 12V gel cells (sealed lead acid batteries), which you can get for about $15-$20 in the common sizes. If you've got the flat kind of UPS which looks like an oversized power strip, then it probably doesn't use gel cells. But the tower kind of UPS which looks like a minature desktop computer almost always do. Just open it up and take a look. They look like this:

http://www.amazon.com/CA1240-Replacement-Battery-UPS-Center/dp/B0174HFM54
http://www.amazon.com/Replacement-Battery-APC-Back-UPS/dp/B006X98A7C

But come in a variety of sizes and capacities, so you'll have to measure the original and note the voltage, amperage, and capacity (amp hours) to find a suitable replacement. If you can't buy them from Amazon, you can usually find them in hobby stores. They're commonly used to run the starter for the gas engine in radio controlled planes, to trigger the motor in toy rockets, etc.

 

[InvalidError]

Don't look at the nominal Ah rating, that can be heavily deceiving. Most cheap lead-acid/AGM/gel batteries are for emergency lighting, alarms and other light-duty loads and aren't rated for the (very) high sustained current UPS require.

You should look at the 15 minutes discharge rating for a more appropriate rating for high-current applications. Many of those light-duty batteries won't even have a 15 minutes rating. The heavy-duty batteries meant for UPS will often have discharge ratings down to 5 minutes.

If you compare the 15 minutes ratings of a high-performance battery with cheap stock, you should see the high-performance battery offering much higher usable capacity. The higher quality battery will also usually also have much better cycle life.