This equipment was installed in my edit suite in preparation for the day that my mains power failed and it would give me several precious minuets to switch off my computer…today it went into melt down mode !!!
I was outside with my brother in law running in a second cable for my HD Sky box and we got a whiff of a fishy smell now and again, after about an hour I went into the edit suite to be confronted with a pungent fish smell…the smell of burning electronics. Fortunately I had installed an isolator switch which kills all the power at once then the window was opened. After a while I did my detective work feeling each and every piece of equipment, at first I thought it was the AJA box as it was beside the APC then touching the APC it was burning hot.
It was literally chucked out the back door and left to cool down where on further examination half an hour later revealed the back up batteries were on melt down.
I do find it very unreassuring that a device made to protect your computer equipment from surges, overloads and power failure can itself smoulder to the point of meltdown without having it’s own inbuilt safety device,…what can I say…other than my advice is as follows…
If you have this model APC Smart-UPS 750, switch it off and take it back to the retailer as it’s far to dangerous to be left alone in an office, I have contacted the company and await their comments.
We run four UPS devices – three of them from APC. No melt downs, but the three newer designs have all proved pretty useless as the batteries hardly retain any charge. By far the best is still our original beige, metal-cased APC 500. Twelve years old, with its original battery, it still provides twenty minutes of emergency power, whereas the two-year-old ES models only manage a couple of minutes, even with replacement batteries. Progress?