Timely news story

I know this is old news now, but it was *relatively* new until 36 hours after I posted it! :)

In other news...

- I took our new car into the shop today to get the roof fixed after I tried to drive into our garage with my bike still on top. The bike (Cannondale F500) and the Yakima rack both survived (I rode 70 miles the next day). I hope to get some pictures back from the body shop when I pick up the car.

- Our dog caught (and killed) the neighbor's cat this morning. Unfortunately, it was the one that the kids in our cul-de-sac were most attached to.

- Just as I was going to leave for work, the sprinklers came on and I saw that we had a broken head right next to the house. Glad that cat slowed me down this morning or we would have had a nicely flooded basement!

- I found out that I'm not going to get the $50 rebate I was promised for buying a new cell phone a while back. It has taken a while because I kept forgetting to call the store and ask why I hadn't received it yet. When I purchased it, I was away from home and on my way to the airport to go on a trip. The store owner who sold it to me said that he'd send me the rebate along with the contract paperwork in the mail when he got the computer problems figured out. Unfortunately, it turns out that the deal he made me was only supposed to be valid at a "corporate" store. On the positive side, I have a new phone and didn't have to do the 2 year contract extension. Good thing, 'cause I don't really like the phone (Motorola V360) that much!

FON

I'm going be jumping on the Fon bandwagon. My equipment should arrive soon and I plan on putting up an antenna (got one like this) on the roof so I can access it while I'm out and about.

UPS waveform article

Saw this article about waveforms from UPS units today and since all 16 of the APC-650 units I have are exactly what is shown in this article, I thought I'd link over to it. I have experienced problems with running UPS units from my small portable generator before, so now I want to go check it out a little and see if I can determine why. Just need to find someone with a scope and some time...

Jesse (the author of the article I mentioned) has also written about a UPS modification he did.

I have a couple of power conditioners from someone who didn't want to bother trying to surplus them. Never had a use for them before, but perhaps now I do! These are the type that claim to create clean power from dirty. They are quite heavy. I want to see if putting them between the generator and the UPS units clears up the problems I have seen in the past. I'll update this article with a model number and a link when I can.

FWIW, I have one of these 110 <-> 220 Step Up / Step Down Transformer / Voltage Conversion units too but I have absolutly no use for it that I can fathom right now. I'm pretty sure it's a model UDC-1500. If anybody locally needs one, you know who to ask!

Moto-M3U playlist fixer utility

I thought I'd share a new utility I wrote for my phone. I got tired of editing the playlists manually so they would work and just wrote a program to do it. It's available from my home page. It works with MediaMonkey and my Mototola V360 phone. It may work with other phones and applications, I don't know.

More UPS units

Since the power outage I blogged about a while back the power has gone out a couple more times and I have inherited (for a small fee an IT auction last month :) several UPS units that are no longer welcome at the company. I need to get them home, remove the batteries, test them, and modify the good ones like I described earlier. Any good ones will be available to the amateur radio community here in Utah County.

These are all 650VA units like this only black. I would be willing to bet that most of them are perfectly operational and that the batteries are just worn out.

If anyone local knows of small personal UPS units like these (I'm not interested in large data center units) that are no longer welcome in their present homes, add a comment here to let me know and I'll do my best to give them a new lease on life.

UPSs save the day

Well, okay, not my whole day, but put together they saved my group at work an awful lot of time today. The power went out this afternoon while I had several long processes running and at least 15 edit windows open (with various stages of unsaved work). While some people here have all of their stuff (typically two 21" CRT monitors and a CPU) plugged into one 800VA UPS, I had the foresight to horde enough older units that I could plug each component into its own UPS (I have a 650VA unit for each monitor and a 1000VA hidden behind the filing cabinet for the CPU :).

The power was out for about 30 minutes. Both of my monitor UPS units died (one after 10, and the other after about 20 minutes), but my CPU stayed up (along with my work). Most people were at least able to save their work (they lasted 10 minutes or so). Sure makes me wonder why some people think that UPS units are not worth what we pay for them...

Link added on VIP Bloggers

OK, so I'm not a VIP, (or a CEO, CTO, HMO, or anything else) nor do I think that I really have much on this page that people who come here from the VIPBloggers web site (first square on the second line) will want to read. Most of my ramblings are about battery chargers and other technical stuff that I have played with.

When I originally got the block of pixels on the site, I didn't even plan on linking back to this blog. I had it pointing at Paul Allen's blog and I was going to wait 'till I thought I had something worthwhile to link to. Like maybe the genealogy I've been working on, or the archive of information on converting old UPS units for Amateur Radio use (yeah, you don't want to miss it). Then Paul went and got his own space and his own link (the nerve!). So, anyway, here you are. Have at it...

Charger "upgrade" disappointment

The Schumacher Speed Chargers are pretty similar in looks, but I have discovered that they do not all operate the same way. I'm disappointed in the upgrade I did when my previous one developed a bad fan. I expected too much I suppose. In going from the 12/25 to the 10/30, I was hoping to have a faster charger when I needed it (after all, 30 amps is more than 25!). I was hoping to be able to charge at a lower rate (10 amps is less than 12) when I needed to because it would be better on my smallish batteries. I was wrong on both counts.

My new charger operates in a single 10/30 mode, not two separate modes (10 or 30). I've actually measured the rates with my Whatt Meter and they are a little higher than the rated rates. The charger will start at a 12 amp rate as it checks the battery to see how it is responding. Then ramps up to 34 amps if it thinks it's doing OK. It will stay at the 34 amp rate for 1.5 minutes or so, then taper back down to 12 amps for 2.5 minutes. It probably averages out somewhere around 25 amps because the tapers between the different rates take about 40 seconds to complete. So, overall, I probably get about the same charge out of this unit than I did out of the old one (it measured 31 amps constant into a discharaged battery).

The 6000A is probably smarter and probably will handle most larger batteries better than the 2500A, but since I have a mixture of large and small batteries that I want to use with it, I don't have as much flexibility. I can't put anything smaller than about 65AH on it and set it for 10/30 because it will hit it with too much current. I wish, for example, that I could limit it to 10 amps (or less) when I use the 18AH batteries from the UPS units I just received (more on these later). For a 32AH battery, a rate of 8 amps or so would be ideal for me. While the 2 amp rate is probably better for the battery, it simply takes too long to charge.

Oh well, it will still work well for chaining up several together and doing them all at once if I need them quickly*. And it will certainly work great for when I'm running it off of my generator if my solar arrays aren't getting the sun they need (if I ever get some solar arrays :). I think I'll go hook it to the 1984 Blazer I've had sitting in the street for the last 6 months (because it needs work). I'm sure it could use a little electron boost by now.

*Be sure to wire up all of YOUR batteries with at least TWO Anderson connectors each so you can do this kind of thing whenever you need to.

Another article and a dead fan.

This is good (if biased and stale) information:

Ample Power Primer

"Biased" in that the company's products are mentioned throughout the articles. Based on what I've read from them, I would probably be happy owning some of their products if I had the need.

"Stale" is relative though. This technology hasn't been changing as much as in the computer world I move in daily. If nothing else, at least read The Power Equation article.

On another note...

The battery charger that I had before developed a problem in the fan. At the charge rates it used (25 Amps) not having a fan would have been very bad (it was not a large heavy transformer based charger). I returned it and switched to its cousin: Schumacher WM-6000A. The two are not that much different in charge rates, but the new one seems to be somewhat smarter in how it applies the charge to the battery. It was $72 at Wal-Mart. I'll write some more about its charge methodology later when I've had time to analyze it more. For now, it seems to do fine - and as a bonus, the fan is functional (and much quieter).

Sometimes "good" batteries do bad things

Well, after several years now of working with SLA batteries, I still haven't learned nearly all my lessons!

I hooked one up to the power supply this morning that I received from the IT group at work (I have them trained to bring me all of the old UPS batteries that they don't want anymore). This afternoon, my family called me and said that there was a really bad smell coming from my office. It turned out that it was coming from that battery. It was having a difficult time venting through its built-in valves and seemed to be getting ready to expand rapidly (burst!). I wasn't about to touch it (let alone pick it up), but I did reach over to carefully unplug it. I let it cool down for a while until I figured it wouldn't follow through with its explosive intentions and I picked it up for photographing. As I type this almost 3 hours later, it's still quite warm.

Pictures of a "Good" battery gone bad.

Anyway, here are some of the lessons I learned:

1. Never believe sticky notes placed on batteries unless you write them.
2. Never hook questionable batteries up to an unintelligent source of power.
3. Be extremely careful charging batteries indoors near things that can be damaged by heat, acid vapors, smoke, explosion, etc.

1. When I received this battery, it was in the pile that was being handed out to replace batteries in ailing UPS units around the company. The UPS at my desk had been complaining and I had requested a new battery for it. This is the one I was given. I put it in, but it did not work. This should have been my first clue that something was wrong! The "Good" sticky label on top obviously fooled someone else before it got me. Since there are no battery testers around (or at least no people in the IT department who use them), once things get mixed up, no one really know what is what. Shh, don't say anything, but I'm pretty sure that I've received several that have never been in service before. At any rate, I figured it was just dead from sitting around so I took it home to charge it up and see how "good" it really was.

2. I didn't test it on my smart charger to see if it would take a charge, was shorted or anything. I hooked it to my Amateur Radio 12 V 15 Amp power supply along with the other dozen or so batteries I usually have floating there. The power supply doesn't have a built-in meter, but I keep one that I made connected inline with the batteries so I can see what is happening. The needle jumped as it always does when hooking up a battery that has not been on charge for a while. As the voltage quickly rose to the level where the supply floats, the ammeter went down to a normal level. Nothing seemed amiss. I left for work.

I believe that something caused the cell to start drawing more power than it could handle and it began to heat up badly. My power supply is happy to deliver as much power as it takes (up to its 15 Amp limit) to keep a connected load at 13.8 volts. The casing bulged under the pressure which the valves didn't seem to release. Perhaps it was just that it was warm enough due to the internal problems that it deformed fairly easily even though the valves were doing their job and venting the gas that was building up inside.

I really don't know yet what caused the failure. I'll look around eventually and try to find answers, but if anyone knows right off and could point me in the right direction, I'd love to hear from you!

I'm no longer sure that a simple power supply is a good way to keep SLA batteries charged. Although I haven't had any fail while they were connected (this one was bad before I connected it), it seems to me that the possibility exists for this to happen. I'll have to do some more research and see what others think.

3. Thankfully, nothing tragic occurred. No fluid made it out of the battery in liquid form, but plenty of gas escaped and made the house smell pretty bad. It was also rather difficult to breathe comfortably in my office for about 15 minutes after I started the fans going. Had I not cut off the power and stopped whatever reaction was occuring, I'm not sure there would have been much left of my house.