UPS Maintenance – The start of a beautiful friendship (between you and your UPS)

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Darin Stahl

Your enterprise relies on stand-by power to sustain business during unplanned outages.   But like any great relationship, it needs to be give and take.  You can’t expect your stand-by power to be there for you if you’re not there for it. And how can you do that? By investing time into regular maintenance.

Why invest in maintenance?

Info-Tech research shows the average cost of maintenance is $4,500 per year for a medium-sized business. But factor in the cost of downtime, and those costs clearly outweigh maintenance costs.

• Info-Tech research shows that enterprises that scheduled maintenance on a routine basis (weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual checks) extended the useful life of their UPS and batteries. Industry standards recommend UPS replacements every 5 to 7 years, but our research shows that proper maintenance can mean replacements every 10+ years. For batteries, industry recommends a 2 to 3 year refresh, but maintenance can extend that to be every 4 to 6 years.
• Info-Tech discovered that enterprises that had difficulty sticking with regular maintenance faced the opposite: higher instances of repairs, replacements, loss of business and ongoing costs.

If you don’t conduct preventive maintenance, you could look at replacing your UPS, which will cost you an average of $130,000.

Doesn’t maintenance make sense now?

Of course it does. So, what should maintenance involve?

Your maintenance plan should involve both physical and operational inspections and tests.

These include:

• Weekly: inspect that no parts are loose on the UPS (check inverters, etc.), check various battery operations.
• Monthly: check physical site, adequate cooling is in place, batteries still working at an acceptable level (80%).
• Quarterly: system shut-down test, battery run-down test, systems assessment with business and IT (is the system still right-sized for the enterprise’s needs?).
• Annually: assess each battery’s life, make battery replacements (if necessary), system assessment (planning for the future).
• Emergency (post-outage): proper shutdown executed, battery charge levels recorded and addressed if necessary.

For a more detailed list of what to check and when, please see the Stand-By Power Maintenance Checklist. The checklist can also be used to establish and conduct your own routine preventive maintenance.

Vendor service plans and your UPS system

When you purchase a UPS system, know your vendor service plan or, if you’re shopping around for a UPS, what your vendor offers. The vendor service plan is often a line item in the cost of the UPS.

It’s up to the enterprise to determine what plan best suits their system and their budget.

But remember, a vendor maintenance plan supplements an in-house schedule, and should not act as a replacement. A key maintenance task is managing your vendor maintenance by recording when they visit and what they did to you ensure that the correct tasks are being carried out and issues are addressed.

Another operating cost consideration to make is looking at monitoring/management software for your UPS. When assessing UPS models, you want to check whether the UPS comes with monitoring software or, if you already have software in place, whether it will integrate into your current system.

Taking the time for UPS maintenance is a win-win: you take care of it and it will take care of your business, meaning less downtime and fewer costs for you.

The Develop a Standby Power Strategy  Solution Set provides even more information regarding UPS systems, UPS maintenance and more.

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