UPS R3000 XR battery issue

[Mark DeBoer]

Hi,

I've inherited a problem with some UPSs that were purchased about 3 months ago. They were set-up and brought online without charging the batteries first. Since day one, the general fault light and the bad battery lights have been flashing on all 3 UPSs.
Is pre-charging a requirement? Or just good practice? The manuals weren't clear, they just said to do it. Will we need to put it into stand-by mode and charge before we can get things going?

Another issue may be the voltage configuration. It's currently set to the default of 120 for all 3. Would that cause the batteries to not charge if it were a mismatch with what's coming out of the wall?

Can I change that without losing power to the connected servers?

Apparently, when the batteries were installed, the red connectors were not connected. They were connected at a later time, but it did not fix the problem. I found no mention of this in the manuals. Is there a battery installation manual that would cover this?

Thanks for any help,

Geoff (not Mark)

[timmy b.]

Geoff,

I just installed a R6000 this afternoon, so this is all very fresh in my mind.

If you didn't connect up the batteries before you powered the UPS up, it would have gone into ALARM mode. I think you may need to power the UPS off to get the controller to fully reset, but read the manuals completely first.


Here is the main manual page for your UPS:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DocumentIndex.jsp?contentType=SupportManual&locale=en_US&docIndexId=179111&taskId=101&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=255222

This is the suppport manual. See Section 3 for your power configurations and Section 5 for ALARMs and their meanings:
http://h200007.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/UCR/SupportManual/TPM_192131-003_rev3_us/TPM_192131-003_rev3_us.pdf

I hope this helps you out.

Good Luck - Tim

[Mark DeBoer]

Thanks Tim,

It appears that (at least one of them) the batteries are bad. It appears that the UPS was ran for a couple of months before the batteries were actually hooked up so I think they deteriorated to a state beyond recovery.

We brought one of the UPSs offline and hooked up to it using HP Power Manager. It initially charged to 12% (almost immediate) and then slowly dropped off to 0%.

We're going to try the same thing with the others, but we're expecting similar results.

I'll post if it turns out to be something different.

Geoff