Swapping Batteries in your UPS - Do it yourself and save some money!

[@gregoryrogers6311]

Great job guys! Awesome walkthrough and am glad you mentioned recycling your old batteries. Great call out! Awesome video as always!

[@2GuysTek]

Thanks Greg!

[@halowizbox]

That is some amazing savings! Nice video.

[@2GuysTek]

Thanks for watching!

[@Anonymous-vc8cd]

To be honest didn't know this was that easy. I am about to crack open my first SMT3000RMJ2U.

[@dr_jaymz]

I think this is by far the best way to go for a home lab. But I have a question. In the video you can see that the batteries are in series and that the UPS is not aware of individual battery voltages. This means that any differences in state of charge could be permanent once connected. On the other hand, Lead Acids are super-tolerant to abuse - the UPS will pass a small current through the batteries; those that are not full - charge and those that are dissipate as heat. Still, at least at the point of fitting them they should all be at the same state of charge. When I bought 10 they were at very different states of charge because they all self discharge at slightly different rates from manufacture. I don't recommend connecting them in parallel because the current could be quite high, so at least charge them all with a constant voltage PSU to the same voltage and check each battery is within 10th of a volt to get the best out of your refurbished battery.

[@2GuysTek]

Great points! Thanks for the comment!

[@jeromejocson5256]

This is cool i hope they do more UPS like this. Cool video! 😀

[@2GuysTek]

Thanks! Glad you liked it!

[@nathanruben3372]

I wish you would have shown wiring closely on on a diagram.

[@Raiongroup]

The original Leoch battery wa sa 12V 5.5Ah battery and the replacement battery purchased on Amazon was a 12V 5Ah battery. You would lose some runtime on these new batteries because they are lower capacity. We would recommend using a high rate discharge battery of equal or greater capacity such as the Raion Power 12V 5.5Ah high rate battery with part number: RG126-22HR

[@AmCanTech]

why would apc use a 3rd party battery brand?

[@russburton6262]

what about using lithium ion batteries instead?

[@2GuysTek]

Unfortunately that’s not possible. My UPS is designed only for sealed lead acid batteries and isn’t capable of properly charging lithium ion batteries as they require an entirely different charging cycle, monitoring, and circuitry. It would be super cool if you could swap out for different battery tech, but it’s not possible.

[@FlaxTheSeedOne]

@@2GuysTek There is the Option of LiFePo4 which have very similar charging characteristics and can be had in the Same formfactor as the Lead Acids, however the DIscharge current on many is limited to 6A which would in turn meat at 130V that you could only get around 800W out of the UPS, which is not bad, but definetly a consideration. But you will get wayy longer runtimes sometimes a 2.5x improvement.

[@xamindar]

Why are you dropping your old batteries off? You can take them to a metal recycler and they will PAY you for them.

[@2GuysTek]

Unfortunately where I live we don’t have a battery recycler near by :-/

[@paulpoco22]

Cool. My 2015 APC 1500G just got the replace battery error. I did order the APC #124 from the APC store on Amazon.ca for about $90 CAD plus tax. This UPS is more to condition the power and shutdown an unRAID system cleanly until power comes back on. Now the run time on current load is about 22 to 26min but when new it might of been 45min.