[synx508]

I have never had a good experience with APC UPSs, my favourite anti-feature is the self-test that ends with power to the load being interrupted. The "shuts off instantly when cable connected" anti-feature bit a colleague of mine recently.

[smithian]

My experience is the same. You would think that their large capacity 'enterprise' products would at least be somewhat more reliable than the under-desk units, but we had nothing but trouble with the Symmetras we installed a few years back. That plus the outageous way the products are designed to maximize future APC revenue in spares and replacements rather than maximize uptime caused me to put in place a new "no more money to APC" rule at work this year.

[Corrado]

We installed a large, rack mounted unit to power our servers but for some reason they were going down, usually after hours. It took us 2 weeks to figure out that the UPS was the reason the machines were rebooting randomly. I never in my wildest dreams would think that the UPS would be the cause; they are supposed to prevent things like this!

Apparently the APC model that we had installed wasn't live failover (or whatever) and when the batteries went "bad" it just killed the power to everything. And thanks to the weird "serial" cables and non-Linux friendliness of APC we never got the monitoring working correctly so we weren't warned about it ahead of time.

Instead of purchasing new batteries for the APC we got a TrippLite unit installed with no problems. It has a standard USB cable and the software works great with Linux & Windows. I even got a used TrippLite unit off of eBay for my office and they sent me rack mounting hardware for free! I love TrippLite and will never again even pause to think about APC.

tl;dr APC screwed us so we switched to TrippLite and have had no problems.

[lutorm]

I've had maybe 8 APC units and one did develop the problem you just mentioned of cutting out when the battery was dead even though the power was still on.

However, I've never had one catch fire while on battery power unlike the first and last TrippLite I tried...

[lipo]

You test your UPS with a live machine connected ? Seriously ?

[synx508]

You misunderstand the meaning of test, the UPS tests itself periodically as part of its normal operation. In this case, if it fails the test it takes your servers with it.

I imagine the test is to ensure the accuracy of the battery runtime prediction, it transfers your load off line power and onto the inverter & batteries. Unfortunately something happens that causes the UPS to shut down or pause rather than immediately switch back to line power. Often the only evidence is that your servers power-cycled unexpectedly, sometimes the UPS actually switches off entirely during the test, however.