What Sort of Maintenance Can I Perform For My Belkin UPS unit?
One thing you might want to do is periodically test your Belkin UPS and their failure modes. A good time to do this might be right after after a periodic level 0 backup. Nobody is logged in and you've got full backups of the machines. Throw the circuit breaker with the Belkin UPS on it to simulate and outage and see how the transition goes. Note that in general testing an UPS by pulling the plug from the wall is not a good idea. Electronics like to always have a good ground reference. If you unplug your Belkin UPS, it's still powered but now has what electricians call a "floating ground". Not only can this be bad for electronics, but it can be quite dangerous as well. It is likely that unplugging just about any UPS for a short amount of time isn't likely to result in disaster, but in all cases, throwing a circuit breaker would be a better thing to do.
It might be useful to install a GFI (Ground Fault Interrupter) on your Belkin UPS-covered outlets to facilitate this testing without having to throw a breaker, especially if you don't have your Belkin UPS protected machines on an isolated circuit (which you probably should). These are the sockets found in most modern kitchens and bathrooms with a red and a black button. You push the latter to cut power and the former to restore power.
The Belkin UPS uses lead-acid batteries. Lead-acid batteries do not have a "battery memory". Each "deep cycle" (running the batteries to very low or even drained levels) will decrease a lead-acid battery's effectiveness, so this should be avoided. Although this is the reason for buying your Belkin UPS unit for situations like this, one should not run a UPS down when doing so isn't necessary.
As your Belkin USP gets older, the battery life will become shorter. Of course there's no way to reliably test how long it is without running the battery down and you don't want to do that because they have lead acid batteries. Which is why we recommend a periodic battery replacement.
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