APC BR800I fails on line, runs on battery, blinks (Back UPS RS 800 VA)

[Guschtel]

Hello,

yesterday my APC BR800 I started to show unusual behaviour.
My apcupsd (i'm using linux) send me an email with the notice of a power failure (although no power failure occured), then another notice that power was restored and then back and forth the same thing with 1 minute delay.
Today the thing failed completely and my computers were all shut down.
The Status in the Emails is ONBATT and Battery charge is at 100%.

So today i turned it off and on again, didn't help.
I removed all cables from the UPS, turned it on then the line led blinks, after a few seconds the UPS switches to battery, then starts switching back and so on so forth.
I've made a video (17megs) to show what it does:
[Link to the video/pictures|http://algo.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~hermann/temp/deleteme/apc/]
http://algo.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~hermann/temp/deleteme/apc/

Is the UPS broken? I assume its not a battery problem since when the battery needed to be changed i got another message and i think the UPS should work regardless of the battery state, if power is on line.

Any help would really be appreciated.

regards
Christoph Hermann

Message was edited by: Guschtel

[BillP · Accepted solution]

Hi Christoph,

The way I see it is that your UPS performs the standard self-test when you first turn the unit on and gets stuck on Online and On Battery. It appears that the UPS is not seeing a good input voltage or frequency. If you have the APC PowerChute Personal Edition installed on a machine, I recommend that you use that first to adjust the sensitivity of the unit. We might need to adjust it to a lower setting.

If you do not have PCPE installed, then we would use the manual method to adjust it. You could use this Video KBase to adjust it first.

[Video: BX/BR Manual Adjustment for Sensitivity|http://nam-en.apc.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10870/kw/sensitivity%20backups]

[Guschtel]

Thanks for the hint!
Setting the sensivity to low did indeed help. Before i tried setting it to medium which did not help.
And since apprently nothing changed regarding my electric circuits, i'm still wondering why the APC suddenly changed its behaviour.

So far, so good. My APC is back online again with battery at 100%, load 40%.

If anything else happens i'll post back here.

Thanks for the support!

[BillP]

You are welcome Christoph.

There's a possibility that the problem is the harmonic distortion that is being fed into the UPS. If you have high powered devices, motor, laser printers and the like can sometimes introduce what do we call as dirty power into your circuit. If the waveform or frequency becomes to distorted the UPS sees this as a bad power and could sometimes damage your load.