Cav's Place

It doesn’t look like I’m going to be sleeping, so might as well use the time to write this. Kept putting off another personal post for the past two days anyway, thinking I’ll somehow manage to write something else first, but now this seems required. It may well prove to be nourishment for the bridge dwellers, but they’ll just get ignored. Hardly in a state that’d allow me to discuss anything with anyone even if I wanted to anyway.

I’ve been using an UPS for my computer for the past six years, if not more. It became necessary while living with Andra due to frequent power fluctuations and the fact that the “normal” voltage we were getting tended to be quite high, constantly above 240V, and I always keep the computer on as well, starting back in 1999, when I started having it work on SETI@home, so that puts it even more at risk. As a result, after I thoroughly analyzed the options, we got a Mustek PowerMust 800, which did its job really well while I lived there. The poor thing actually was in AVR mode nearly constantly, seeing as that triggered whenever the voltage was outside the 198V-242V range, and the battery had a fair amount of work to do as well due to the fluctuations I mentioned.
She kept that one after I got kicked out and I got a new one of the same model, which once again did its job really well for some two and a half years. However, that ended in the second half of 2008, when the battery died. I believe it first kept my computer up for several minutes because the power went out when I was taking a shower and I couldn’t immediately rush to turn it off, but then never recovered after that effort, even though the monitoring software was listing the charge as 100%. The next time there was a power failure, I got the “battery low” warning after about a minute, though it held until the computer shut down. The next time after that, the warning came up the moment the power failed, and afterwards it was completely dead, so my computer just turned off the next time the power failed.
By then it was already three years old, which is the amount of time these batteries are supposed to last anyway, so I replaced it with the next model, PowerMust 848, seeing as that one was discontinued. It actually arrived on April 1st and now it would appear that the joke really was on me.

I first noticed an issue when it kicked in Sunday morning, at around 5:25 AM, when I was in bed but still awake and heard it activate. Seeing as the power wasn’t off and it wasn’t beeping anyway, I got up to investigate and saw the voltage above 254V, which is when this model goes in AVR mode, having the standard set at 230V. I also saw the battery drain to 63% very quickly, though I assumed it was because it needed some time to adjust after I had turned on the monitor as well while it was busy adjusting the power, but it was a sign of things to come…
After I woke up that day and saw the battery only at 79%, even though the voltage came back within more reasonable levels at 7:32 AM, I started checking the log more thoroughly and noticed that the battery never recovered full charge, which is 13.6V, ever since June 2, when there were two power failures within hours of each other. Until Saturday morning the drop was minor and it held steady at 13.5V, but then it dropped to 13.4V and later that evening, so only hours before the event that made me check it, it went all the way down to 12.9V without any reason whatsoever. Then it had apparently recovered to 13V and then dropped even more, to 12.8V, when I noticed that 63% charge. Afterwards, it held at 79% charge for a couple of days, then started trying to go higher but never managed to hold it.
The first attempt to increase the charge got to it 84%, and 13.2V, then it fell straight down to 52% and 12.6V on its own. Haven’t seen any such drops after that, but the pattern seems to be the same. It struggles to get to 84%, stops there for a while, then very slowly loses the additional charge until it settles back down to 79%. After a brief “rest” at that level, it once again gets to 84% and the cycle repeats itself.

Now it wouldn’t have been that much of a problem if the battery would simply have lost some maximum charge. It would have been a little early, since they are supposed to last three years, as I said, but probably manageable for a while longer. However, this morning it just decided to turn itself off, obviously also turning off my computer in the process, which means it really needs replacement.
I think I was just asleep for a few minutes when I woke up quite confused and I needed just a moment to realize why: The computer was off. Now I don’t know if the UPS actually beeped once first or the silence was what woke me up, but checking the log afterwards proved that I woke up just when it turned off. So I got up, figured out what happened, checked the UPS and saw that it was indeed off. Pressed the power button twice, since it was still in the “on” position, and it turned back on well enough. The charge is also still listed as 84%, where it actually managed to stay for the past three hours, and there is no log entry about any event that might have caused it to turn off. It is possible that there was a brief power failure and it was completely unable to switch to battery, so it turned itself off without managing to log the event first, but I can’t know that and either way it doesn’t matter.

I wrote a long note and left it on the kitchen table for dad, but have no idea what I’ll be doing now. Warranty expired in April, so I guess it’s time for a new one, quite some time earlier than expected and even a few months sooner than the previous one started experiencing issues. However, that implies interacting with dad in some way when I’m so scared of everyone and everything, and especially of him, seeing as he can do things that can have major and immediate effects on my situation… It may also imply, if it’ll turn itself off again for no apparent reason, having to do without an UPS for some time, until the new one will arrive. I do have the normal power cables, so far unused, but it will first require moving some things around and then I’ll be at the mercy of the power fluctuations, which hasn’t happened in a long time, plus that rather frequently getting over 250V early in the morning is rather worrying without an UPS as a safety net in case it gets too bad… Sure, lots of people manage it like this, shrugging off the reboots when there happen to be power failures and possibly not even being aware of the high voltage issues, but I’d really prefer not to risk it!
Then again, it does seem to be a rule, doesn’t it? Something failing in or related to my computer when I’m really out of it. Could even say that it took its time right now, because I’ve been in this state for a couple of months already. There have been times in the past when being very angry or scared immediately caused temporary computer problems, and it only took a couple of weeks after I bumped into Andra again that time towards the end of 2007 for the HDD I had at the time to fail, so it was unfortunately expected… Now I guess I can only hope there won’t be even worse problems, though I did see some new bad sectors on the HDD as well…

Note: Edited in the afternoon after noticing that it was in fact bought in 2009, not last year, so warranty did just expire…