Slightly OTT : Riello UPS

Yes, thet are. I stuck a Moor & Wright digitally enhanced caliper into the screw head and measured that as 2.26mm - a pretty good match for T8 if you allow for the narrow flats on the caliper not allowing it to fit right into the star angles in the screw heads.

I live in Harlow (with a silent T) and only some of the TORX sets in local shops go as small as T8: the rest start at T9.

Riello UPS stuff is made in Italy.

As I said, IMO this is just excessive caution in case some numpty tries the swap batteries while the UPS is running, no doubt the result of overcautious lawyers being overprotective of numptys.

Thanks, but no thanks: the thinnish-looking sides aren't bulging so I don't think the UPS is damaged (though I might be surprised) but unless things have changed a lot I still expect that anything cheaper will not meet my requirements, which are to do all of the following:

- run at least two devices (house server and my LAN's gateway router) The Riello has 4 mains outlets

- to be able to all attached devices for at least 10 minutes The Riello reports 50 minutes for my stsandard workload

- to tell my server to shut down after a configurable time with no mains input.

All these features are non-negotiable.

FWIW when I bought the Riello in 2014 the only cheaper ones either had sub-10 minute support times when driving a single PC, only a single power outlet and no ability to tell the kit it was driving to shut down after a configurable time.

In the past I'd been using dual 2966 mainframes where the whole computer room was on a UPS with 40 minute stay-up time, i.e. long enough for the operators to kick all users off and do an orderly shut-down on both machines. Following that I'd worked with both Tandem Nonstop and Stratus fault tolerant kit. Both have an internal UPS, which is a given in any fault tolerant system.

As a result, I knew exactly what I expected from a UPS, i.e. what I listed above, when I bought the Riello.

My requirements haven't changed since then.

In case you're wondering, everything else I depend having available are laptops, so they already have a decent UPS capability.

Even if shut off, there tend to be some pretty chunky capacitors inside UPSes, and even if there batteries are /nearly/ dead, but not quite, it only takes accidentally pressing the "on" button and then you've got 240V coming from the inverter ...

With all the repairability pressure building up, I think the Riello approach is becoming untenable if it isn't already there.

Anyway, I'd think a section in the manual that covers all of the following:

- a warning that you may be subject to a 240v shock and possible death if you don't follow insteuctions exactly

- advice about getting an engineer in if you've never done anything like this before

- disclaimer of liability if you don't call and engineer

- advice on disconnecting it from everything and leaving it for the recommended time before even thinking about starting to take the lid off.

- tools required, including multimeters etc

- opening the box

- swapping the batteries

- putting put the lid on again.

- initial tests

should just about do it, especially if run past lawyers before publication.

As I said before: you might be amazed at where UPSs get installed and how much a repair visit might cost if its in an unusual location and not easy to get at or repair, so the option of self repair should be provided (even if fenced round by legalities and other impedimenta) rather than a wall of unhelpfulness.

I'm not against people replacing batteries in a UPS, the APC ones you can open the battery compartment *without* any special tools, just a cross-head screwdriver, and you don't get any exposure to more than the 48V DC side.

But if you have to take the whole case off, and that might leave you exposed

On a sunny day (Sun, 20 Feb 2022 23:12:02 +1200) it happened snipped-for-privacy@f1.n.z2.fidonet.org (Vincent Coen) wrote in snipped-for-privacy@f1.n.z2.fidonet.org>:

I work a lot with small electronics, my solution now for the very small components is +2.5 glasses from the local drugstore that I put on top of my normal glasses. Cost next to nothing, and strength of the glasses just adds up. Super magnifier!

Today I fought clear of building my gliding club's duty rosters (an all- week job) for long enough to hit my local B&Q for a TORX key set. Just tried it on the Riello UPS: T8 fits the case retention screws as expected. Will get into UPS battery replacement as time permits: no rush as currently my house server is up and running directly from the mains.

Following up: yesterday I opened the Riello's case: the TORX T8 tool did the job easily. The internals are neatly laid out with a lengthways metal partition, batteries on one side and a PCB on the other. Slightly to my surprise thare are no large transformers or particularly large capacitors inside.

The old batteries came out easily enough, and show sign of bulging, case deformation, or leakage.

The replacements went in equally easily.

I've run it very briefly with no obvious problems shown.

Further use awaits the purchase of more cabling since I've decided to rearrange the wiring and position of stuff under my computer bench: while doing that I found I need a manins-'extension, a double ended IEC cable with C13 and C14 connectors.

When I renewed the batteries in my old APC UPSs, I had to run the test program to update the run-time variable.