Tech Tidbits – Happy New Year – Calibrate Your UPSes

January 1st, 2023
Tech Tidbits – Happy New Year – Calibrate Your UPSes

"I am watching you...Always watching"

-Roz Monsters Inc.

For New Year's we once again had a holiday crisis. Fortunately, this wasn't an attack. Microsoft had a 2022 date bug in Exchange that totally shut down the on-premise Exchange server's ability to send emails worldwide. It wasn't my favorite way to spend the holiday weekend, but keeping you safe and functioning is what we do.

However, another issue came to my attention that I have spoken about in the past and is worth mentioning again.

UPSes

Hopefully, you had some time to calibrate your UPSes over the holiday break. Calibration on an APC Smart-UPS allows it to find the actual limits of useful battery life to keep your systems safe. If you didn't do it over the holidays, put this on your list to do.

But along those lines, I would like you to add a few more items to your list:

  1. Go into your UPSes and look at whether they are set to self-test every one to two weeks automatically. If they aren't, then you should turn that on. I'd rather know that my batteries are shot when I can do something about it vs. when everything has crashed and died.
  2. While inside the UPS console check how old the UPS is. If you are beyond 3-5 years, that UPS should be on your radar for replacement in a future budget cycle.
  3. Check load. Do you have anything overloaded? Do you need to rebalance the load? Do you need an additional UPS in that closet to properly carry the load?
  4. Now I want you to go visually inspect all your closets. Do you see red lights that need to be investigated? Get behind your UPSes. Are any plugged into a power strip before they get to the wall? This is a very bad thing for multiple reasons. Do you have power strips plugged into the UPS because you don't have enough plugs? This is also bad. Do you have devices that should be on the UPS plugged directly into wall power? APC says that a power strip can confuse the UPS and in evaluating a power source or power requirements. Plus the fire marshall will stroke out if they see UPSes plugged into power strips. We all need plugs and APC makes something called a PDU which is essentially a compatible power strip for your UPSes to add more plugs. If you have capacity on the UPS and simply need more plugs, use a PDU vs. a traditional power strip.

We are here to help. Give us a call.

Happy New Year

-Scott Quimby