Mind, I'm not defending APC _per se_, but some of your issues appear to me to be non-issues. Just some observations on APC, and UPS units in general. On Thu, Jan 01, 2009 at 02:26:45PM -0500, Robert L Cochran wrote: > The APC unit serving my network support devices failed suddenly after > a very short lifespan of about a year. I think it developed an internal > short in it that fried my web server machine. According to the APC website: The APC Equipment Protection Policy pledges up to $25,000.00 USD to repair or replace your APC-protected electronics should they ever become damaged by a power surge (United States and Canada only ...) I'd argue with them that was what happened to your server. > The one serving my personal machine failed quickly as well and the > combined cost for both these devices was well over USD $300. You do know you can get those units replaced under warranty. > The larger-rated APC units of 800 VA or more are physically very large > and heavy and accordingly difficult to move around. Goes with the turf--lead-acid batteries are going to be heavy. > I'm aware that I can recycle UPS batteries but in my location this is > inconvenient to do, ... When you buy batteries, almost all of them come with a return mailer for the used batteries. > ...and the right batteries are hard to find, ... Just buy on-line; I can't remember ever buying a replacement battery locally. They're cheaper than buying from the vendor, too. Use a shopping service such as shopper.cnet.com or www.pricegrabber.com. > ...and when a UPS unit fails I must decide whether to spend the > money to replace the entire unit or not. At least APC units usually take the replacement battery. I've had horrible luck with TrippLite UPS units--new batteries often still don't revive the UPS. > I've made the decision not to buy APC brand units any longer. I don't really have anything good to say about any consumer-grade UPS units I've worked with, especially the little workstation ones. > I'm using a "Geek Squad" unit from Best Buy for my network devices > which is higher capacity, cheaper to buy, not so darn heavy, physically > smaller in size and appears to be better built. After they charged a client of mine (well, she became a client after this) a couple of hundred dollars to clean viruses off a system--and "upgraded" her to Windows XP--it was still infested with the same viruses. And when she came to me, I found the XP was using a known stolen activation key (it came up on a google). I won't have anything to do with Geek Squad or anything branded by them. You do know that "not so darn heavy" probably means it's either not a lead-acid battery--and depending on the type, that brings its own problems--or it's an undersized battery. As I said, I've had bad results with TrippLite (pity, too--they're a local Chicago company, so I'd like to support them) and virtually all consumer-grade APC units. The commercial APC units have been OK, if not great; battery life for any UPS is about three years, and they seem to survive that long. They're too expensive for any significant run time, however; all you're getting for an affordable price is about 10-15 minutes of run-time on a full power outage, making them essentially surge/brownout protection and clean shutdown units. $0.02, YMMV, etc. Cheers, -- Dave Ihnat -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
