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My first big server room fire drill taught me more than any certification

I was working at a small IT shop in Des Moines about 8 years ago. A client called at 4:45 PM on a Friday saying their whole office network was down because the UPS in their server closet started smoking. I showed up, yanked the power, found a melted battery cable on a 10 year old APC unit, and swapped it with a spare we had in the van. Everything came back up but we had to reset about 12 workstations the next morning. Has anyone else had a UPS fail in a way that wasn't just the battery dying?
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2 Comments
anna_carter53
Holy cow. Yeah, I had a UPS once that didn't just die, it started making this loud clicking noise. Like a relay was stuck. It was doing this weird thing where it would flip between battery and wall power every few seconds. Took me way too long to figure out it wasn't the battery, just a bad circuit board.
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perry.jessica
perry.jessica11d agoMost Upvoted
Yeah @anna_carter53 ever feel like electronics just want to mess with your head for fun? I swear my old UPS clicked louder and more dramatic than a broken smoke detector, just to make sure I noticed it was dying. Now I just unplug stuff and save myself the headache.
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