I've seen two previous APCs (both Matrixes) fry batteries... The batteries balloon up, and get really hot, and are too big to extract from the chassis. APC's solution to this is to have us take the entire UPS offline for several days to completely dissipate the heat, and then try to
I've got a few APC SmartUPS's in the shop at home that I disassembled last week. Two SU1400's and one much older SU 2000. All of them had overheated and exploded cells. The 1400's all leaked and were /very/ wedged in. I ended up removing the outer shell, then the circuit board. Once these were out of the way they frame spread enough to allow the swollen casings to slide out. Both of these had acid all over the bottoms. One of these had been leaking so long that it ate a ~1/4 inch hole through the bottom. The 2000 had the worst batteries, but once I got the plastic battery casing opened (I CAN see why they stopped using this design...) and got all of the connections apart, the cells just dumped right out. Maybe I'll take some pictures of the batterys...it was sort of fun to see how they had expanded and wrapped around each other. :) I've only heard one report of APC's that caught fire...and even then it was just the carpet below that caught fire. ...david --- david raistrick drais@atlasta.net http://www.expita.com/nomime.html