UPS death gives me the horrors

I'VE TAKEN my UPSes (two) for granted until this morning, when the older one, a CyberPower 375SL, started bleating without visible cause.

It's been in trusty service for at least five or six years, so I figure the clock has run out on the lead acid battery. It's so old, CyberPower doesn't even stock the model anymore. Currently the smallest UPS it has for the home market is the 425SL (i.e. 425 volt amps (VA) as compared to my elderly 375 VA model). Lead acid batteries have their good and bad points, but sooner or later they die like every other battery and need to be replaced. In theory, I can order replacement a replacement battery from CyberPower to drop into the UPS, but I am deterred by self-replacement by the five red "CAUTION!" warnings in the user's manual even before they get into the instructions on how to replace it.

I think that and item number four on the checklist "Wear rubber gloves and boots" when replacing the battery sort of does it for me. About the only thing they don't put in there is "Have trained medical personnel standing by in case you manage to shock yourself."

So plan "B" means I have to truck down to the local dump during "Household Hazardous Waste" hours and unload my UPS on them, since I just can't chuck it in the trash. Well, I could, but since the normal trash pickup burns the refuse, having a couple of pounds of lead and sulfuric acid go up in smoke doesn't strike me as the best thing in the world for the local environment.

I also may go with plan "A" - as in American Power Conversion. APC seems to have the act together a lot better on the environmental/convenient consumer front on this particular problem. It will allow me to trade in my old UPS - regardless of who made it - for up to a 35 percent discount on a new APC model.

If I need a new battery down the road, or for my current working one, it will take back the old one with pre-paid shipping thrown in and handle the disposal - no messing around with "Household Hazardous Waste" hours at the dump.

Of course, if I exclusively used a laptop, I wouldn't have this problem. If the power goes out, I'm still good to go for not two to five minutes, but two to four hours, depending on what I'm doing. I wouldn't have access to external drives or my big 19-inch monitor during a power outage, but that shouldn't be a problem.

If next-generation computer designers wanted to be "smart" about putting together the next generation desktop tower, they might want to engineer a solution that includes one or two slots for lithium-ion batteries.

Certainly the power pull on a desktop is going to be significantly higher than a laptop, but having the capability to have a faster charge cycle and continuously trickle-charging a lithium battery pack has to better than having to fuss with lead-acid batteries in the future. µ