IT ISSUE · SERVERS AND INFRASTRUCTURE
UPS or power warning
A power or battery warning. Here is what we check, and where the cause stops being an IT problem.A UPS exists to give equipment a controlled few minutes, not to carry a business through an outage. When one starts warning, the cause is often not in the equipment at all: a battery at the end of its life, a circuit shared with something that should never have been on it or a building supply that has been marginal for a while and is only now being noticed.
What you may notice
- The unit beeps, or shows a fault or replace-battery light.
- Equipment restarts during brief power dips.
- Runtime is much shorter than it used to be.
- The unit runs hot, or reports an overload.
- A whole rack or cabinet loses power together.
If the unit is hot to touch, swollen, leaking or smells of burning, switch it off at the wall if it's safe to do so, and keep people away from it. Don't wait for us.
Check the unit, the load and what it is actually protecting
We check the unit, the age of its battery, what is plugged into it, whether the load still matches what it was sized for and whether the equipment behind it shuts down cleanly when the battery does run out.
Past that point it belongs to an electrician or the building, not to us. We'd rather say so on the first call than arrive at it over three visits, and a power problem that keeps returning isn't something a different UPS will fix.