FOUR APC 750's ALL failed in one year?!?

[Anonymous user]

I have purchased FOUR APC 750's.  None are older than one year.  ALL of them have suddenly started the infamous 1 minute chirp every 5 hours.  This is in an office with many people and they are annoyed at this noise every day from four different batteries!  ALL of them have the red light on for Replace Battery, yet ALL of them also have FULL green LEDs for Battery Charge!

WHAT can be done about this?!  I am not about to buy four replacements for units that only a YEAR OLD!  If this cannot be fixed, I WILL be getting a competing product.

[Terry_Kennedy_apc]

When one of the APC folks sees this, they will likely want the first 8 characters or so of the serial number to determine how long ago the units were built. For warranty status, they will probably need the whole serial numbers, which you could either post here (if you don't mind) or wait for one of the APC people to contact you directly.

If you bought them from an authorized reseller less than a year ago, I would think they would be under warranty, which is something else the APC people can confirm.

Battery lifetime depends on a number of things, including the number of discharge cycles (and their depth) and the temperature they are operated at. There is also the possibility of a bad batch of batteries (if all your units were purchased at the same time) which simply didn't appear until now.

[Anonymous user]

So until such a time that an APC employee sees this, is there a way to disable this amazingly annoying alarm?  It is going off eight times a day in the space of four adjacent office cubicles and nerves are getting on edge.

[Anonymous user]

Well from the Support page, I put in the model number (SUA750US) and it tells me "No results found"  the only SUA750 listed is for India Specific.  I am in the USA.

[BillP]

You can see that model here: http://www.apc.com/resource/include/techspec_index.cfm?base_sku=SUA750US 

There is no way to disable this audible alarm as far as I can tell. The only option I am only 99.9% sure on (and would like to be 100%) is using PowerChute software to set the UPS audible alarm to "never." I am pretty sure this only would apply to the other types of beeps the UPS makes for other conditions but I am going to have someone check it for me and get back to me by Monday. There is definitely no way to do it through the UPS panel itself though. 

[BillP]

Sorry for the delay. We had to track down a UPS with this type of issue/alarm and apparently muting the alarm through a USB/serial USB connection and using PowerChute Business Edition is possible. It will stop the chirping. I realize that is not easy and may not be an option but the battery is the lifeblood of the UPS so I can see why it would be difficult as if you don't manage this issue, the UPS may be useless. Investigating the age and why the battery failed prematurely potentially would be another thing to look into. As was suggested, it is possible wherever these UPSs came from, could've had them sitting in storage for some time where the battery was left not charging.

[Anonymous user · Accepted solution]

Another thing I've seen in the past is that the staff doesn't realize when they turn the lights off and go home that the outlet plugs that the UPSes/computers are plugged-into are turned off along with the lights. So every night, the UPSes discharge until their batteries are completely dead, and then recharge in the morning.

After a year of that, wouldn't surprise me one bit if all the batteries were toast.