Testing of battery packs in Smart-UPS units

BillP · ‎2021-06-28

It is my understanding that an APC UPS tests its batteries and calculates runtime by switching to battery, measuring how the voltage changes over time, and measuring other aspects of the electricity. If it drops too quickly, this will trigger a bad battery notification.

With the new SRT models of the Smart-UPS Online series (replacing the older SURTA models), the battery packs have the same kind of connector as before, but seem to have some kind of in-band signalling. See, if you connect a battery pack to the SURTA, you have to update the battery pack count manually in PowerChute to update the runtime estimate. With the SRT, when you plug in a battery pack, the LCD screen tells you it sees it, and even says it's updating the firmware, and then the runtime is updated automatically.

Does this new capability also introduce any new way for the equipment to tell you which battery pack has a bad battery? By that I mean, if the Bad Battery LED on the SURTA appears, you had to disconnect all battery packs and add them back one at a time until the LED comes on again, to figure out which pack has the bad battery, then you can swap batteries to find out which battery in the pack is it. I'm hoping the battery packs connected to an SRT can test their own batteries and identify their status individually to the UPS through this new data communications channel, eliminating all that manual work.

And is there anything else the new signalling capabilities between the SRT models and their battery packs can do?

BillP · ‎2021-06-28

Hi Jeffrey,

Yes, the smart batteries used in the new SRT units allow the UPS to indicate which external battery pack is bad. It wont tell you which specific module within the pack, but it will isolate it to the pack. With that being said, our guidance is always to not mix old and new batteries and batteries in a single installation generally age at roughly the same rate since they are in the same environment, have had the same amount of use, etc etc... This document address that: http://www.apc.com/us/en/faqs/index?page=content&id=FA317828

As far as other features with the new smart packs - runtime reporting should be more accurate, setting the number of external packs is automatic, and there are intelligent temperature sensors in each external pack which will report back to the UPS to assist with temperature compensated battery charging. This will improve performance in "less than ideal" install environments.

Thanks,

Liam

See Answer In Context

BillP · ‎2021-06-28

Hi Jeffrey,

Yes, the smart batteries used in the new SRT units allow the UPS to indicate which external battery pack is bad. It wont tell you which specific module within the pack, but it will isolate it to the pack. With that being said, our guidance is always to not mix old and new batteries and batteries in a single installation generally age at roughly the same rate since they are in the same environment, have had the same amount of use, etc etc... This document address that: http://www.apc.com/us/en/faqs/index?page=content&id=FA317828

As far as other features with the new smart packs - runtime reporting should be more accurate, setting the number of external packs is automatic, and there are intelligent temperature sensors in each external pack which will report back to the UPS to assist with temperature compensated battery charging. This will improve performance in "less than ideal" install environments.

Thanks,

Liam