In article ,
Yuki writes:
On Mon, 06 Jun 2005 23:00:06 +0100, Jason Arthurs wrote:

I've recently been offered an APC SmartUPS 900 at a bargain price of
£50 the unit is still sealed in the original packaging and is
obviously unused. The seller cannot confirm how old the unit is (the
SmartUPS 900 has been discontinued) and our best guess is that the
date of manufacture could be as early as 2001.

I'm still using one bought in 1995 in its third set of batteries, a hint about
the age is if it has the old style logo (slanted APC text with a middle line)

I bought a SmartUPS 900 in 1996. Sometime before 2000 (probably
1998 or 1999), I tried to buy another but that model no longer
existed. So it will be older than 2001 certainly.

Bearing in mind this unit has never been charged, what sort of
condition are the batteries likely to be in. Sealed lead acid
batteries are supposed to have a long working life, but does anyone
have any idea what their shelf life would be?

Most probably they are shot, a stored UPS it's supposed to be charged every 3 to
6 months.
The batteries are not too expensive, it's some years from the last change but I
believe it uses four 6V, 10-12Ah (depends on brand) Lead-Acid sealed ones, OEM
brands are Panasonic or Yuasa.

The APC ones have 1/4" tags, whereas the standard size tags on that
size battery are one size smaller. If you close up the connectors
with pliers to make them tighter and push them on past the shoulders
on the tags, they seem to work OK on generic batteries. After a
battery change and full charge, you must do a calibration run on the
UPS or it will have the wrong idea of the capacity of the batteries.
I never worked out how to update the battery change date stored in
the UPS, although that didn't affect anything else.

The SmartUPS 900 did wear its batteries out rather quickly -- they
normally drop to zero capacity in around 3 years of standby use,
which was really rather poor (worse than any other UPS I used).

--
Andrew Gabriel