APC Symmetra LX Both Battery Modules Bad?

[Anonymous user]

My weekend was single-handedly ruined by my Symmetra unit sending out SNMP alerts that the battery was discharging even though the power was on.  From the logs it looked like the unit was in a self-test loop.  Every minute or so it would self test over and over again until the battery charge was at zero.  I called support this morning and the tech led me through diagnostics and came to the conclusion that both battery modules were bad and needed to be replaced.  The management console listed both batteries as good and the unit is less than 3 years old.  The tech said that diagnostics showed the batteries were over 50 degrees-C and that may have led to the failure.  That's odd because the ambient temp of the room is about 23 C and the internal temp of the APC is reporting 39 C.

Now I'm in the uncomfortable position of running my environment in bypass until the replacement batteries are overnighted.  The reason I purchased this unit is because of the redundancy aspect.  Redundancy does no one any good when both parts die at the same time.  This seems VERY odd to me.  Is this normal for both battery modules to go bad at the same time?

With the unit in bypass, the battery is recharging from 0% and 2 hours later it's at 30%.  Do I really need new batteries?  What exactly happened here?

[Anonymous user]

The problem ended up being the L2 power module.  I was wondering why he was so apologetic on the phone.  I had no idea the APC reps actively monitor this forum.  Good job guys.  My frustration wasn't aimed at the tech, I just wanted to know from the community if it was common for both batteries to die at the same time.  That was very odd.

[Anonymous user · Accepted solution]

I know this may not be much consolation, but I had a similar experience, except I had FOUR sybt5's in the UPS frame flagged as bad simultaneously. All had to get replaced. A couple of  weekends back I had one battery out of two in an adjacent LX melt down (thermal runaway) quite badly and the UPS'  intelligence modules put the UPS into bypass automatically to shut down the charging. I swapped out that battery , UPS came back online and am rebuilding the other one so back in business.... except for the fact that the Battery bus voltage is falsely being reported as 146.4 V DC on the Powerview when it actually measures 136 or so (which is normal)... not sure what's up with that !  Unfortunately short of doing a MIM log dump there is no way of getting battery temperature information out of the LX other than to physically put your hands on the modules ! Best of luck,