Like all electronic and electrical equipment, A UPS needs sufficient maintenance in line with the manufacturer’s guidelines to ensure optimal reliability. However, a UPS located in harsh environmental conditions can fail even if it is well-maintained.
The number one way to keep your UPS up and running is to schedule regular maintenance checks. Here are three ways UPS maintenance can provide insight into the health and life expectancy of your critical infrastructure – and potentially save your skin in the process.
Regular UPS maintenance checks prevent battery failures.
Battery failure is the leading cause of UPS failure. However, batteries rarely fail overnight – they typically slowly decay, often giving you time to catch and replace them before they flatline.
Preventative maintenance includes visual inspection, battery voltage testing, thermal image scans, and more to determine the health of your battery system.
If tests show any irregularities, we can determine how long your battery has left and when you should replace it.
Even if your battery manufacturer says your battery has an expected lifespan of four to five years, it’s still important to regularly schedule maintenance checks. Adverse environmental effects, such as storing your UPS in a hot room, incorrect float voltage, or repeated battery use can significantly reduce a battery’s projected life.
What it comes down to is this: There’s no real way of knowing how much life your battery has left without a maintenance check.
Most UPS manufacturers recommend scheduling two preventative maintenance checks annually. Just take a look at the graphic below to see how much each check improves your battery’s uptime:
Regular UPS maintenance ensures optimal UPS efficiency.
To ensure maximum efficiency of a UPS over its lifespan, the capacitors within the UPS need to be maintained at the manufacturer’s recommended ambient temperature, humidity, and cleanliness. Keeping the UPS in a dry, tidy, clean, and well-lit area as well as checking that all alarms and indicators are recorded, logged, and reported correctly will help to optimize its efficiency.
A carefully structured maintenance program would include servicing all the UPS installation’s major parts; the UPS itself, the battery and the generator if present. During a maintenance visit, a full inspection of the UPS’s critical instruments should be carried out and checked for correct operation. Meter readings should also be checked, recorded, and verified for accuracy and local and remote monitoring panels, communications channels, and indicator lamps should be checked for correct status indication.
The environment surrounding the UPS should then be evaluated, removing any obstructions or debris from around the UPS, and checking for optimum operating temperature with good air circulation while changing any air filters as required.
During a maintenance visit, the degradation of any critical component should be identified, allowing the repair or replacement of broken parts to be carried out before failure occurs.
Regular UPS maintenance can help avoid a catastrophic loss.
Power quality issues can stem from various sources, including your UPS as well as other equipment in or around the facility. During every maintenance check, we’ll look at the UPS system with an experienced eye to help pinpoint failing components. Regular maintenance will help to ensure that the UPS continues to provide instant power and that an instantaneous switchover from mains to UPS is achieved.
A trained technician will investigate and test many of the internal components that are prone to failure. In addition to batteries, these components include:
- Fans
- AC and DC Capacitors
- UPS Internal Connections
- Air Filters
- Power Supplies
- Contactors
- Sticking or welded relays
You wouldn’t expect your car to continue running smoothly without an oil change and other regular maintenance. The same goes for your UPS and battery systems.
Unscheduled power failures and subsequent loss of critical loads are costly and painful. Avoid the pain and schedule yours today – they’re the surefire way to ensure you have a dependable UPS to keep your facility and business running.
For more information on our comprehensive maintenance plans email info@actolog.com or call +2349062830782. Alternatively, visit our UPS maintenance page
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