[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...