Maintenance on your UPS and battery backup power plant

How important is it to perform regular maintenance on your UPS and battery backup power plant to ensure your critical data centre load works unhindered by power supply?

The power uptime and power supply reliability are critical to any data centre, IT load, process, or other critical loads. It is imperative to use the best quality UPS and technology available, like a Riello uninterruptible power supply backup system from Standby Systems. Services must be unaffected under all grid supply conditions to prevent failure and software corruption in server type and electronic equipment applications, which are severely affected and damaged by voltage and frequency variations in power supply.

Without a UPS system behind it, Data centres, IT, and the like would all suffer severe effects from the power supply variances, electrical noise, transients, surges, spikes, brownouts, and blackouts common in the ESKOM power supply grid. The result is data loss, breakdowns, loss of productive time and money due to loss of service, and possible loss of client and user base who will simply move on to another supplier.

To ensure that a RIELLO UPS system and its backup ELITE battery are in top condition, it is essential to perform regular preventative maintenance to avoid load power loss when the mains supply fails. Components like fans and capacitors suffer wear and tear in time; therefore, these consumable items require replacement every few years, as do the backup batteries.

When undertaking maintenance, it is important to consider the following:

1                Preventative maintenance and servicing should only be performed by Riello trained and approved service agents and personnel

2                Maintenance should be performed using the Riello service software UComm GP for all modern UPS systems to ensure they are running with the latest firmware and software versions available from the manufacturer

3                Servicing must be performed a minimum of twice annually

 Preventative quarterly maintenance and remote management

The key to performing preventative maintenance and remote control/monitoring is to ensure that the load is never interrupted by power problems, and that your business operates smoothly. Ensure optimum performance and highest practical efficiencies to minimise running costs such as electrical losses and consumption by the UPS plant and increase the overall reliability and performance levels.

 During periodic maintenance:

- All settings are carefully checked

- The event history is downloaded for further analysis off-site to investigate any possible problems that may have occurred

- Useable components are replaced

- Confirm that up-to-date software and hardware are being used.

Remote management is the constant monitoring and control of the UPS plant 24/7 via an existing network using one of the many network interface cards available. These include the SNMP version 3, Modbus, JBus, and many more, either in the same building as the UPS or even from another province or country. This has the added functionality to give advanced warning of some possible failure or problem that is developing, allowing for emergencies to be prevented and fixed before they occur in a lot of cases.

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