Some years ago, I bought some APC Back-UPS Pro units to keep a few important but non-critical home items working. I’m particularly invested in this because living in a large city, there are frequent short outages and I’d rather not have all my network kit reboot each time the electricity supply sneezes.
Recently, I had to replace the batteries on two of the three UPSes as they’d served their eight-year life well. There’s nothing worse than having a UPS that doesn’t protect your equipment.
To swap the batteries is a breeze and with my units, I can do it without powering anything down. A more complex task is to set the battery replacement date within the UPS – two of mine were showing a 2-3 minute runtime even on a full battery.
There is Windows software to do this, but what if you don’t run Windows? On the Linux systems here, it turns out to be ridiculously easy using NUT:
upsrw -s battery.mfr.date=2026/03/01 ups
No, that’s really it. Both UPSes now show in excess of 30 minutes runtime, protecting against a power outage for 20 minutes or so before attached equipment will start to shut down.