So yeah, came home from work one night and as we walked to the landing I could smell a funky electrical burning smell, hmmm, walked upstairs and it got stronger, went into the little bedroom which I have converted into an office for myself and it was a really potent electrical burning smell I immediately started sniffing about (as you do) I had my fingers crossed it wasn't my beasty watercooled SR2 rig but the smell wasn't very strong near that, I then sniffed my HP Microserver and another machine I had running, nether smelt that bad then I got on my knees and sniffed the APC UPS under my desk and wow I nearly threw up the smell was so strong, I touched the side of it and it was stupidly hot, I mean if you left your hand on it you would get burned!! I quickly shut the HP Microserver down along with a couple of other things running of it and then grabbed a towel and legged it into the garden with it! I left it 2 hours and the dammed thing was still pretty hot when I went to check it, I took the front off to look at the batteries and could see they had majorly expanded and were stuck in there! After another 2 hours the batteries had shrunk enough to get them out, and well, check the pics below and bare in mind these were after they had cooled and contracted! The PCB board in the top of the UPS is bent like a banana now as well so I have decided its getting binned, not even going to try and salvage it, was a good 8-9 years old anyway and I've done 3 battery changes over those 8 years, just had its time I think... R.I.P APC UPS! Any idea what would have caused these batteries to do that, dodgy battery cells or something??
Crikey, Good job you discovered it in time, or you could have had a much worse situation on your hands. Sam
I'm not really good with electric stuff, but I guess it could have been voltage regulators or something like that. Regardless it is good that you caught it. It could have been disastrous. I'd be tempted to get in touch with apc about it if you still have it. They may be very interested, especially if the batteries were pukka, not some made in China clone.
It wouldn't have been the batteries. 2 won't go like that together, had to be the charger not tripping when the batteries had a full charge and it continued to pump juice through them. I've had it happen to cordless drills before and it just makes a right mess of the battery.
Yup... Looks very old indeed, did it even have any battery protection systems? Temperature sensors, battery self-tester, etc..? Don't know much about these things but I think it is recommended to change the batteries to new ones every 3-4 years? Editt;; Didn't notice that you have changed the batteries frequently.
Yeah was an old 700VA one, its been brilliant over the years and I changed the batteries every 3 years-ish, these have been in there about 1.5 years, very strange but time for a new one I think after dodging a bullet with this one! Are the CyberPower ones any good does anyone know as they seem a good price and im only going to be pulling aroung 250w through it?
Unlucky about the UPS coola Lucky your noggin picked up the sent of it dying else I fear something far worse could of happened *goes off to check his APC for fear of it blowing up* :/
As my wife has just said, you were cery lucky that they didn't catch fire and i agree, I have seen small batteries explode (AA,AAA,C,D, 9v e.t.c.) and they are bad enough but those would be like a small bomb IMO. Hopefully you can sort out new batteries or would it be a nre UPS job?
Batteries expanding like that isn't really that unusual. Especially not on larger UPS systems. A few guys at work always carry large screwdrivers to pry the battery packs out of the chassis. The larger ones usually have protection systems to shut them down, though. (This is why you have multiple power supplies in important equipment; one in the ups and one directly to the grid. If the UPS shuts down you still have power )
