ugh… instructables… no thanks, not clicking.

I’m really unimpressed with ‘ibles lately, they’ve been crippling the site unless you pay them money.. to the point where you can’t effectively read the articles, even if *you* wrote them.

I deleted all my articles there once they started forcing people to pay them to read my articles that I licensed as CC-NC-AT. That shit’s just not right. If they want to charge for my free content they’d better fucking well start paying me.

And hopefully you don’t keep these in a small room because of the gas the batteries give off.

i dont pay anything and i can view instructables just fine, provided that i sign in first.

I got a good 5 years out of pretty much the exact same setup and only replaced the whole thing last year.

Wonderful setup, although my new one is admittedly nicer.

LOL. If you think that’s cool, check out my UPS revamp! I’ve gotten HOURS of uptime out of it, and the ups is rated for 30 amps, and today sits in my basement, hardwired. I’ve also since made some corrugated plastic covers to keep anything from touching the tops of the batteries by accident.

The cable I used is 6 gague, which was thicker than the cable used internally as designed by APC, and there’s 100 Amp fuses in line. Each of those copper lugs was soldered on with a vice and blowtorch. The two serial sets of batteries in the pics are themselves used in serial by the UPS for 48v@100A.

Batteries: http://lh6.ggpht.com/_Bz7xoI4bnUY/ROPQUhVIABI/AAAAAAAAABg/nxYDtw_g0wE/s912/DSC02550.JPG
Closeup: http://lh6.ggpht.com/_Bz7xoI4bnUY/ROPQ5QelABI/AAAAAAAAAAk/IV6YAcUiIWk/s912/DSC02551.JPG
Cables: http://lh6.ggpht.com/_Bz7xoI4bnUY/ROPRbFhyABI/AAAAAAAAAAw/4SsJnoUoh_0/s912/DSC02552.JPG
Connector: http://lh6.ggpht.com/_Bz7xoI4bnUY/ROPPCpJ4ABI/AAAAAAAAAAM/xOpNaq0nP7M/s720/DSC02548.JPG
Cables tucked away nice and tidy: http://lh6.ggpht.com/_Bz7xoI4bnUY/ROPTyvfgABI/AAAAAAAAABQ/yLtwZNCXkrw/s912/DSC02556.JPG
Whole System: http://lh6.ggpht.com/_Bz7xoI4bnUY/ROPPCpJ4ABI/AAAAAAAAAAM/xOpNaq0nP7M/s720/DSC02548.JPG

Its ok Zigzag… They will learn when the diodes in the charging circuit blow up.. Good luck with the 84 amp hours going through 10 gauge wire lol! its only meant for very short distances at that amperage… I wonder what would happen If you touched the negative side of the exposed battery terminal with your hand and touched your computer case?

are you guys confused or something? almost all UPSes i’ve encountered use lead acid batteries internally. Maybe these aren’t sealed, but they’re still lead acid. The chargers in them are typically fairly dumb low rate float chargers, and unless the external batteries are lower capacity than the internal batteries, there is very low chance that you’ll fry anything.

This will not improve the power capacity of your UPS, but will increase the amount of time you can run whatever’s connected to the UPS before the power goes out. Most likely (I’d imagine) the power capacity of your UPS is limited by the power transistors and not the battery power capacity. If it were limited by battery power capacity, then hell, it probably has a pretty good chance of blowing up without the mod anyway.

scrap last post, just saw the 24v part on his post. Looks like that’s 30$ I can save on buying a new battery, since I have a good marine battery out in the garage somewhere.

I see that people have no clue about batteries.
AGM is a lead acid battery. But it is what they call starved electrolyte battery with vastly different charge characteristics, educate your selves and even give it a try, I design charge controllers for solar cell systems which can use lead acid OR AGM batteries there is a huge difference in the float voltage required to maintain a charge. Too much voltage and you over heat your batteries and dry them out.

bobdole….its not hard to register on instructables….theres not even a cost…its free..

Yeah, instructables has gone downhill. I remember not having to register for any reason. Then goes “All steps on one page”. Now its practically useless without registration, unless there is only one picture in every picture group. (Registration required to switch to the other pictures in the group.)

also something else to consider.. if your going to go with a bigger ups. setup a better charging system.. its better to charge each battery on their own.. to keep their life longer..

Not sure why everyone is ragging on instructables. I’ve been a member for years, and even with the changes I don’t see anything that has crippled the service. Sure if you want to view the entire ‘ible on one page you need to sign in, but that was in place before they were requesting donations. If it’s a matter of not wanting to give your email, make up one in yahoo, gmail or any of the other free email services. how lazy have we become that you’ll boycott a site with good content just because you don’t want to register. O.o

the quality of articles on hackaday and makezine has gone down the toilet.

This is a stupid thing to do. The charger in your UPS will not be able to keep up (higher AH = higher charging current). Either the UPS will get damaged, or the cells will be undercharged and their life reduced.

I’ve done the same thing, the 5Ah SLA battery in my UPS died so I hooked up my 70Ah SLA battery instead :) I also connected a car charger to the battery to power my Eee, so it means I can switch off my main PC which uses 20x the power of the Eee.
Now all I need is a UPS my ADSL router likes, it will only work with a pure sine wave :(
No idea how long it’ll power my main PC because cCome to think of it since I got my 70Ah battery I haven’t actually run it flat or even half-flat yet, I suppose that’s a good thing, longer life ‘n all.

BTW, Systm did a show on replacing your UPS battery with a larger one in March this year – http://revision3.com/systm/hackedups

Bunch of babies. Jeez

http://www.instructables.com/pdf/Rework-a-UPS-with-Massive-Capacity/Rework-a-UPS-with-Massive-Capacity.pdf

>This is a stupid thing to do.
>The charger in your UPS will not…

That, and you can usually Ebay used 2u rackmount UPS’s very cheaply. Since the whole global economic meltdown there has been lots and lots of this equipment coming up on the ‘bay for not much dollar. Any “IT” worker has ample opportunitys to liberate this gear too.

I’ve seen a proper, 5′x3′x3′ free standing, ups catch fire and start melting down inside a datacentre.. good times!

instructables claims they will only allow the “all steps on one page” option for “pro” users

http://www.instructables.com/community/Pro-Instructables-Accounts/

i think we should start re-posting instructables (license permitting) into a better site, this is ridiculous.

I have a 6kw double-conversion inverter that runs most of my house (double-conversion = everything runs on the inverter all the time). I did this upgrade back in October. Added 16 deep-cycle batteries, giving me 22kw in the battery bank vs. the original sealed batts that only had a few thousand watts. One recent test ran most of my house normally for 17 hours.

Don’t worry about the charging circuit, it will just charge the new batts more slowly – which will extend their life. And if you do this to the cheap inverters just add a fan or two to prevent the melt-down. Not hard for this crowd.

I have fried the charge circuit of a smaller UPS with a large deep cycle battery, no fire though :)

This works just fine for me.

I’ve been doing this for 2 or 3 years with a Tripplite Internet350U which, I guess is a 350VA ups. I use it to keep car batteries charged on vehicles which are not currently in service. This is helpful because it keeps the batteries at a healthy state of charge.

Instead of 4 or 5 minutes run time I can power my computer, monitor, modem and router hub for over an hour and a half which will get me through most power outages.

Apparently the charger is a constant current source which shuts off at 13.90VDC and comes back on at 13.65VDC. When only charging one car battery it is hard to see the ramp with a cheap DVM, because it’s pretty quick. However when charging 2 car batteries and a motorcycle battery, the on/off cycle takes 5 or 10 seconds, and it can’t keep up with a third car battery: it never reaches 13.9VDC to shut off the charge current.

I got the idea off the internet – I thought it was right here?? – some article about a franken-ups.

http://www.windsun.com/Batteries/Battery_FAQ.htm

This should answer alot of the battery questions.

Someone please pipe-in and correct any wrong information from that page.

@InstructableHack

quick!!! post it to hackaday or make an instructible out of that!

@Mark Richards: Oh dear god I’m glad you’re not my neighbour. You are so clearly incompetent that you could not possibly built anything safe and functional. You describe a profoundly dangerous literal, time bomb. Don’t you dare, ever try to do anything yourself because you’re clearly incapable. Immediately surrender you real name and address so I can report you to your city electrical inspector to have your power cut off, and get you imprisoned.

I on the other hand have a completely self build UPS powering multiple DC levels, and 120v and over 300 120v Amps continuous with a measured four day uptime before voltage in the main array drops to 80%. Certainly long enough before my four natural gas, and two diesel generators to start, and they can produce. I even got it UL certified you fucking tool. If you don’t have three separate, hermetically isolated vaults of batteries, you’re clearly not playing for keeps.

Your setup is clearly shit, and you should eat shit and die you fool. oh yeah. My penis is larger than yours too!

@Wulfman

I am skeptical as most about this post but surely they aren’t too different, we do after all replace a lead acid battery in our cars with these agm batteries.