In my last post I talked about my new APC Symmetra UPS for the home lab and overall it has been running great, but as all UPS’s go, it has lost some batteries in the last month. I expected this because some of the batteries were 4+ years old.
I priced out batteries online, and clearly, APC original replacements were not going to be an option for me due to pricing. (Keep in mind if I wanted to replace all of them I would need 40 batteries.) Other options for just the batteries were about 15-20$ for each battery.
Someone (and I cannot remember who) suggested that I take a look at ATBatt.com as they had great luck with them. So I headed over to their site and found the batteries that I needed, in fact, they actually have a “kit” to replace all of the batteries in one of the SYBT5 modules. The list price was about 10 bucks a battery, which was pretty awesome because I had two of my 4 battery modules fail and I needed 20 batteries.
However, instead of just ordering two kits I emailed them and asked for a quote. Scott from ATBatt was very helpful and provided me a quote that also included a VERY nice discount plus the shipping costs.
I went ahead and executed on the quote on Friday, March 17th, and by Tuesday the 21st I had two large boxes on my porch with 20 batteries! Talk about fast shipping!
Swapping out the bad batteries was pretty simple, nothing more than a screwdriver and some time was required.
Overall, it was a great transaction, and the UPS is back up to about 1h30m of runtime.