APC UPS BX-1100VA shuts down on its own

hitender_s · ‎2022-05-22

I purchased a brand new UPS in October 2021 for my PS5 and TV. Has been working fine but I noticed that today morning the UPS shut off on its own. Both devices were switched off at the time. My apartment complex has a back-up generator which switches on within 10 seconds of a power cut. Today morning around 6AM there was a power cut which I'm assuming might have something to do with it but my area is prone to power cuts and I've never had issues before with the UPS. It has always switched from mains to back-up in the event of a power cut seamlessly and switched back to mains when the back-up generator switched on and power supply resumes 10 seconds later.

When I woke up, I tried to switch on the PS5 but noticed that it wouldn't switch on. I checked the UPS and noticed that the Power on/off light was off. I switched it back on and it blinked maybe 10-15 times and switched on. At the same time, the battery charging indicator switched on as well. Just to see if the battery continues to charge, I switched off the UPS again and this time the battery charging indicator was still on. The battery charging indicator remained on for may 20-25 minutes before the battery was charged completely. As of now, the UPS is functioning normally. I tried cutting the power from the mains and the UPS was working fine.

This has happened before as well, probably 1.5 months ago. Same situation but last time there was a major fault with the power line in our apartment due to which power was cutting in and out regularly so I assumed that the UPS wasn't getting enough time to charge up and died because the battery ran out (no devices were switched on and powering the UPS when this happened).

Curious to know if something is up with the UPS. It's not even a year old yet.

Thanks!

JonPro · ‎2022-06-14

Hello @hitender_s,

One possibility that I can see here is that the UPS has run on battery due to power issues. It is possible that the generator kicks in but at that time, it might be supplying a distorted input to the UPS.

Unfortunately, with the information that we currently have, we wouldn't be able to fully diagnose the issue with the UPS. I would recommend setting up PowerChute Personal Edition on a computer running a supported operating system and leaving it turned on for it to be able to record the power events that the UPS will encounter.

Please see the references below for your perusal.

I hope this helps.

hitender_s · ‎2022-06-14

Thanks for you reply! I had an APC technician visit my apartment to examine the UPS. He ran the standard diagnostics and found nothing wrong. He did say that the UPS has a failsafe feature where it will sometimes shut down automatically when it detects highly irregular power supply to avoid damage to the UPS and the devices connected to it. This can sometimes happen during extreme weather conditions or when the source is providing fluctuating power which makes sense because the there was a thunderstorm going on when the UPS shut down.