SURT10000XLT Uneven battery discharging

[Anonymous user]

I have a SURT10000XLT purchased in 2006 or 2007. Yesterday it failed with an inverter fault, switched to batteries, shut down the servers and turned off. I came in and the room smelled of sulfur, made me suspect battery issues. Found a small leak. The unit has three external battery units plus the one internal for 16 battery packs total. The eight oldest ones were clearly unusable, some were leaking and all read out very low voltages. But the eight newest ones are a different story. There are two sets of four, each set purchased at the same time. In both of those sets, the two left-most batteries were discharged, and the two right-most batteries were fully charged (102-104V). I verified the inverter fault was related to the bad batteries by disconnecting the external units, putting the four good batteries into the internal battery slots in the chassis, and firing it up. It ran with no problems or faults and completed a self-test.

Now the question: Can I safely conclude that the problem was the batteries and that the UPS is ok? Our power consumption has decreased since the unit was purchased so I feel safe running on two battery units instead of four. But how to explain the uneven discharging? We have two step-down transformers connected. There are four outputs on the back. The fact that only two of the four outputs are in use and that only two of the four batteries were discharged makes me suspect that may be the explanation. But if there's something wrong with the UPS (i.e. it isn't charging all the batteries properly) I don't want to put all our equipment back onto it until the issue is resolved. Thoughts?

-Joe

[BillP]

If the UPS is on the network (which I assume it is since you're using telnet to access it), you can FTP to it and get the log files - instructions are in the knowledge base (http://www.apc.com/site/support/index.cfm/faq/) and search for article ID FA156131. We'll need at least data.txt and event.txt as noted in the instructions.

Anyway, if you saw inverter fault and it cleared, I'd say that is the issue which could be causing other problems but the logs can help me analyze further.

[Anonymous user]

I have a SURT10000XLT purchased in 2006 or 2007. Yesterday it failed with an inverter fault, switched to batteries, shut down the servers and turned off. I came in and the room smelled of sulfur, made me suspect battery issues. Found a small leak. The unit has three external battery units plus the one internal for 16 battery packs total. The eight oldest ones were clearly unusable, some were leaking and all read out very low voltages. But the eight newest ones are a different story. There are two sets of four, each set purchased at the same time. In both of those sets, the two left-most batteries were discharged, and the two right-most batteries were fully charged (102-104V). I verified the inverter fault was related to the bad batteries by disconnecting the external units, putting the four good batteries into the internal battery slots in the chassis, and firing it up. It ran with no problems or faults and completed a self-test.

Now the question: Can I safely conclude that the problem was the batteries and that the UPS is ok? Our power consumption has decreased since the unit was purchased so I feel safe running on two battery units instead of four. But how to explain the uneven discharging? We have two step-down transformers connected. There are four outputs on the back. The fact that only two of the four outputs are in use and that only two of the four batteries were discharged makes me suspect that may be the explanation. But if there's something wrong with the UPS (i.e. it isn't charging all the batteries properly) I don't want to put all our equipment back onto it until the issue is resolved. Thoughts?

-Joe

[BillP · Accepted solution]

This UPS comes with a preinstalled management card. Is that configured and available on the network? Are we able to download event.txt, data.txt and config.ini from it? It'd be good if we can review the logs from the system to see if there are any faults in there. I am hoping since you knew there was an inverter fault, you got that message from the management card?