SMX3000LV No Output Power, 0% Battery

[Anonymous user]

So i am in a disagreement with our maintenance department. They seem to think that it is unlikely that the 120 Volt Supply Circuit Breaker for this UPS is being shut off, and the fault is likely with the UPS itself. I disagree.

The SMX3000LV is a 2016 unit according to the factory testing sheet taped to the unit. The unit is plugged into a 120 Volt, 30 Amp receptacle. It is not connected to any external management devices, it is running as a standalone, isolated unit. Full load on the system is 2580 Watts, but it typically runs at 10% load according the LCD and the highest load I've seen is 30%. In the past week, on two separate occasions, the unit has gone to 0% Battery power and completely shut off output power to my equipment. And without any human intervention the power was restored to the equipment and the Battery % slowly climbed back up to 100%. The UPS is not showing any Alarms, Warnings, or Abnormal condition lights. I did observe the LCD screen in the 1st no power condition and the screen was still lit showing no Load and Battery 0%, the LCD screen did not shut off or go dark. Is it possible that this unit is spontaneously shutting off line power and battery power to my equipment, restoring itself, and then showing the batteries as completely drained and then showing them slowly recharging them with no faults? Could this be caused by a bad battery? Is there any other plausible cause for this situation other than the Input Power source being disabled long enough to drain the batteries completely?

Thank you for your time,

-Cody

[BillP]

Hi Cody -

Do you happen to have a Network Management Card in your UPS? If so, we can get the logs off of that and have a much better idea of why the UPS is switching to battery.

Liam

[Anonymous user]

Liam,

Unfortunately this unit is not equipped with a network management card.

[BillP · Accepted solution]

Ok, well you could always install Powerchute Business Edition on a PC (connected via USB or Serial) and gather some logs that way. It's possible that there are outages happening, but its also possible that there are just under voltage or over voltage conditions happening. You may may be able to deal with those by adjusting the voltage transfer points and/or sensitivity on the UPS.

If you wanted to take a stab at making some adjustments without first gathering logs, you could do that as well. From the LCD screen of the UPS you will find an option called "Local Power Quality" in the configuration menu. If your unit is at defaults it will be set to "Good", which is the narrowest set of power parameters.  Try setting this to "poor", which is the widest set of parameters. This will allow your UPS to stay online during most all power events. We will never pass power that is outside of CBEMA standards, so your attached equipment will not be at risk of damage or anything like that.... You may very well find that making this change clears up the unexpected behavior.

Liam

[David_Layne]

I have had this same exact issue on several of our units as well on multiple computers.  Usually starts happening around about a month after install for us.  We have one one each one of our 12 machines and they only have a computer and a monitor plugged into them so the power usage is low (20% load).

[David_Layne]

We have the same issue on our units as well.  We have 12 computers and each one is hooked up to its own UPS.  The only other thing on the UPS is a monitor so each one has a low power consumption (20% load).  Each one of our computers operates a machine and when the battery drops to 0% it shuts down our production lines.  This issue usually starts to show itself around about a month after install so I keep a few of these on hand at all times.  We do have the software loaded onto each of our computers and no faults show in the logs.  Not sure what else we can do.

[David_Layne]

This appears to be an internal issue that APC has been unable to resolve so far.  Have changed out setup parameters to show "poor" power quality, but continue to have the issue.  Our power supplying these is good, but it continues to randomly go from 100% charge to 0% charge in an instant then starts charging slowly again.  This happens with and without any load on it.  Good luck with returning any units on warranty too.