Refurbishing APC Replacement Battery Cartridge #7

Roughly 4 years ago, I blogged about a battery change to my UPS. The post is at APC Smart-UPS battery change. My unit eats APC Replacement Battery Cartridge #7 as replacment, and they are generally available in the net. The price point is there, such a replacement costs 250,- € easily. Much more, if you're not careful.

Couple years after publication Mr. Oliver commented my post (https://blog.hqcodeshop.fi/archives/195-APC-Smart-UPS-battery-change.html#c2000) about getting a pair of Yasa NP7-12 batteries. In his comment, he posted a PDF-spec http://www.yuasabatteries.com/pdfs/NP_7_12_DataSheet.pdf. Just by eyeballing the details, it became obvious, that there is no way in freezing hell, to be able to use that particular battery unit as replacment.

While I dismissed the suggestion quickly, Mr. Oliver succesfully incepted the idea (if somebody hasn't seen Inception, you missed my point there). In life, there are situations where the plan is a crappy one to begin with. On the other hand, sometimes the plan is rock solid, but implementation falls short. For best results, a good plan and good implementation is needed. So, I decided to investigate this battery replacement thingie and come up with a good plan. Initially it was more like a wish, I had no way of knowing how my chips would fall out.

The Investigation

So, when yanked out of the UPS, a APC Replacement Battery Cartridge #7 looks like this:

During the 4 years of running, it gathered some amount of dust. If I would care, I would have cleaned the worn out unit before taking the pics, but ... naah. And if you want to know how to actually yank it out, see my previous post.

In a glance, the #7 doesn't have any moving parts in it. There is nothing to remove, nothing to un-screw. But a closer inspection reveals some plastic covers just attached to the battery with a two-sided tape:

Yes! I'm, getting somewhere here. A close-up on the battery connectors:

The battery connectors have holes in them and there is a M6-screw running trough them. A 10mm wrench and a PH2 screwdriver will do magic there.

Finally I had all the parts separated:

There was some adhesive tape to make the two batteries stick together. As all the connector bits were removed, I just applied brute force to separate the lead acid batteries from each other.

The Plan

Battery used by APC:

A Hitachi Chemical Energy Technology Co. Ltd, GP12170. Spec is at: http://www.csb-battery.com/english/01_product/02_detail.php?fid=5&pid=13

My simple plan was to:

1. Find out if a suitable replacement battery was available. Mr. Oliver suggested that the price range would be £30,-
2. Get the replacement batteries
3. Apply some adhesive tape and screw the APC-connector bits and their plastic covers back
4. Plug the refurbished unit back to my UPS and admire the results (success of failure)

The Implementation

Finding and getting the replacment units

Nope. Just by googling, I didn't find that particular GP 12170 battery anywhere where the shipping costs wouldn't kill me. Lead acid batteries are heavy, as in expensive to ship, remember, the lead-part there.

• Since asking doesn't hurt, I just popped by my local battery-guy at Akku-Arkka Oy.
• His first question was: "Which lawnmower did your take that from?"
• I was in luck! He had suitable units in stock. For some reason, they are sold as a twin-box:
  
• Obviously, a twin-box is exactly what I needed for this purpose!

Assembly

At this point, my plan was coming together.

1. I just got some two-sided tape, stuck some of that on the side of the battery and stuck the other battery to the tape to form a single unit.
2. I screwed the APC-bits back to the connectors. Even the holes were precisely the same size.
3. More two-sided tape to the top and battery connectors were nicely covered.

I didn't bother taking any pics of this. My final result looked un-surprisingly like the original APC-unit.

Plugging it in & testing

Since these quality UPS-things have hot-swappable batteries, the UPS-unit was running my computers all the time since the batteries failed, I removed the old battery-pack and finally was about to test the new battery-pack. The obvious risk at this point was if I made a mistake and my UPS would completely fry because of that.

But no, it didn't happen. Everything worked perfectly! My APC utilities on Linux indicated following:

# apcaccess
APC      : 001,043,1009
DATE     : 2018-05-20 13:03:11 +0300
VERSION  : 3.14.14 (31 May 2016) redhat
CABLE    : USB Cable
DRIVER   : USB UPS Driver
UPSMODE  : Stand Alone
STARTTIME: 2018-05-20 13:03:07 +0300
MODEL    : Smart-UPS 1500
STATUS   : ONLINE
LINEV    : 234.7 Volts
LOADPCT  : 13.6 Percent
BCHARGE  : 100.0 Percent
TIMELEFT : 91.0 Minutes

Finally

Looks like all the lead-acid batteries in world come from Vietnam. See article Is Vietnam the new China for lead-acid battery manufacturers? about that.

I saved ~150,- € by doing this instead of going for the official unit. Nice!