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    APCUPSD test battery capacity

    Hi guys! Long time, no see. Sorry I haven't been around more, but dang, this last year has been technology hell for me. Being a support admin really takes it out of you. lol But anyways, I have a question. Since installing APCUPSD, I've had great success with it, and no issues. However, that being said, I do have a slight issue. I've looked through the documentation for APCUPSD and APCtest, but I find no way to test either battery capacity, or current battery status/life. On my laptop the battery and brightness function tells me that I have 79% of my battery's original capacity remaining. However, on my desktop I don't have that ability that I can find.

    Is there a way to enable that, or a test I can run to see where my batteries sit presently? If not, I'll need to follow my old NOC rules of replacing the battery pack at the 3 year point regardless of whether it needs it or not, as I have no proper way to know if they really do need it or not. At least not presently. The unit is an APC 1500VA model BX1500M 24v battery core unit attached to a Ryzen5 workstation. So anyhow, is there a way on my desktop to test the batteries in my APC UPS and see where they stand? As practice has taught me, they're totally fine until they hit 50% capacity, after which I'm no longer able to forestall replacing them. However, if I can delay having to replace them for a while longer, that'd be awesome. But, I need to have a way to know for sure without pulling them and manually testing the pack. Thanks guys for the info!

    #2
    https://wiki.ubuntu.com/apcupsd

    TLDR: kill the apcupsd daemon and run apctest

    Please Read Me

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      #3
      Yep, already did that. Also, I found out something interesting. APCUPSD doesn't have the ability, short of doing a battery calibration, to know how much battery life remains. Which, TBH, is kinda confusing to me given that KDE does it natively on laptops, but somehow you can't do it on APCUPSD. Then again, a bit more digging also revealed that this is likely a shortcoming of the UPS model I have, and not an actual issue with the daemon as plenty of other people are reporting similar issues on the same model. Evidently, in APC's infinite wisdom, they forgot to add the battery life protocol to the IOS for the UPS. So yeah, lots of facepalm there. Ugh. So, short of doing a battery calibration, which actually does damage to the battery (it requires you discharge the battery to 25%, but you should never discharge any AGM or LA battery below 50%, or you risk damaging it), I'm kinda stuck. *sigh* Yep, leave it to me to pick the UPS with the mental issues.

      *shakes head* Too bad you can't patch the IOS on one of those or I'd update it to fix that. Well, that is, if APC actually released bios updates for their units.

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        #4
        Laptops have the circuitry, sensors and on-board software (firmware, rather) needed to read and determine this, built in. The UPS units you have I am guessing don't have the capability or components and firmware that a laptop mainboard has and needs.
        My Cyber Power System, Inc. CP1500 AVR UPS doesn't have this sort of capability, either, even using its Linux software. Similar in size, but fewer features than yours.

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          #5
          Hmm, yeah, that's kinda what I've gathered. Coworker friend of mine, who recycles old server rack hardware, has a 3U or 4U rack mount UPS, and that's got all that finite monitoring stuff built in. So I might look into that going forward as APC has been impressing me less and less as time goes along. So I'm probably gonna go with another UPS company once this next set of batteries run their course. I know APC's are good for 3 sets of batteries, or about 9-10 years of life, but I think I'm gonna cycle this out out at the next battery change, or maybe even before, and go with something else. Might even fork over the extra cash and go with a nice rack mount one as those have all the extra toys I want, and the extra lifespan beyond what you get in the commercial market. Then again, I guess that, when you pay what you do for one of those units, you deserve to get the extra toys that come with it.

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