APC Matrix 5000 Hack

by nathan on Jul.19, 2009, under Hardware

I use a lot of power in my office, so much that the four 1500 VA UPS units I have only last me a few min. I needed something bigger so I went on eBay and found two APC Matrix 5000 UPS units for $450 each including shipping. There was only one downside, there were no batteries and new batteries would have cost me several thousand dollars.

The solution? I picked up 8 marine batteries at the auto parts store and wired them up (yes with fuses) into two 48 volt strings connected in parallel.

Note: If you try this, you want to use Marine or better yet Deep-Cycle batteries rather then car starting batteries. Car batteries are designed to give very hight bursts of current and should only be discharged to about 5%. The very thin plates would destroyed over a few hundred discharges rather then the thousands you would get from deep cycle.

P.S. Yes, I built a cover for it!

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:Hack, Project

4 Comments for this entry

Brian
August 24th, 2009 on 11:22 am
What’s the runtime on these compared to the normal Matrix cells?
admin
September 13th, 2009 on 11:57 am
It is about 20% longer.
Bechara
November 19th, 2009 on 3:51 am
how did you get out of communication between batteries and the control board.
admin
November 29th, 2009 on 3:15 pm
I started with a battery controller board from a old battery box, but ended up just not using it. The Matrix does not actually care if it has battery communication or not.