Not the shipping company. I've got this APC UPS. It's a small one, but it's only purpose is to supply power to a fancy X10 LCD control panel, so that when the power goes out, I don't have to reset the date and time. You may say that I'm just being lazy, but when the power goes out literally every single day, it's tedious to set the information on this thing.

Anyway, the problem with the UPS is one of its "features." Whenever the power goes out for more than just a blip, it sounds off a LOUD beep every 10 seconds to let you know that the power is out, presumably so you can shut off your computer or whatever.

So there lies the problem. I do not want this damn beeping. When it's silent at 2AM and suddenly you hear this horrible beeping noise from downstairs, it's quite annoying. Unfortunately, I can't find any information on how/if you can turn it off. Any ideas? In our area, either the power is out for under one minute or for hours. Either way, the beeping is not needed for a tiny LCD that must be able to last for several hours even on this small UPS.

The unit is made by APC, and has the model number ES 350. It appears, after a Google search, that APC also confusingly calls it the BE350. Does anyone else have one of these?

I had the same problem with my APC UPS and I merely opened the thing, located the piezo buzzer, and removed it.

I also did that once for a dryer that was near the baby's room, which would do the buzzer thing at 5-minute intervals near the end of a cycle.

Sometimes brute force is the easiest way to solve a problem.

That sounds like a good suggestion It's not connected now, so I may open it up at some point.

Ah the days I used to work in a government building where everyone had one of those. When the power went out it was the most annoying experience of my life. Hundreds of those guys alerting us to the fact that the power was out. The darkness kind of clued us in . . .

If you don't want to remove it then they can usually be muted quite substantially just by sticking a piece of tape (or even better, chewing gum/blu-tac) right over the hole in the piezo element.

Gareth

Some APC UPSes can be told not to beep. I don't know which ones they are, but they're the ones that have programmable internal EEPROMs.

Check out the Unix-based apcupsd documentation. It's available for Win32 as well, so you might be able to at least configure the beepstate, then get rid of the apcupsd package.

My oldest APC UPS has dipswitches on the back to control stuff like that. It now only beeps when less than XX minutes of battery power remains.

The other more modern ones here are bloody useless in that regard. No dip switches, no software support.

Cheers

I'm sure the two APC UPSes we have at work can be told not to beep. However they are not exactly bottom end at 1500 and 2200VA.

Worse for us is our Dell PERC RAID card in our Poweredge server. It beeps when rebuilding a RAID5 drive. And that takes hours (something like 6 or 7 I think). When we first got it I decided to try out the hot-swap RAID5 capabilities and pulled a drive on it live. Wasn't very popular at work that day....

Here in the APC software.

Well, I opened mine up the other night. I guess I didn't want to mess around with it too much, and I couldn't find that speaker. It was difficult enough to get the thing back together. I hope I didn't break it.

So now I'll have to try to find the funky USB to RJ45 cable that came with the thing, and see if there's software for my UPS.

Nothing that looks like a piezo buzzer at all?

Therein lies the problem...I have no idea what that looks like Besides, I don't think I would have been able to get to it. Things are pretty cramped in there.

On my UPS, the buzzer looked similar to this one.

My UPS wasn't cramped inside once I took it completely apart. Although it was probably a completely different model than yours, so I have no idea how easy or hard it would be to work on yours.

The thing to remember about those UPS's, though, is that if you're taking them apart be real real careful not to shock yourself. The energy stored in the battery (and, I'm sure the capacitors), can be quite large.

Probably should have said something about that before encouraging you to open it up.

The older style metal ones are much easier to work on than the plasticky ones. Those are pretty much what is around in the low end models. It seem like trying to open that plastic case up is a mission.

Yeah, I was a little worried about shocking myself, so I didn't go any further. I'm also not interested in removing everything, as putting it all back is way more effort than I'm willing to exert for a stupid beep. So I'll try the software route.

Since they're simply 12 volt batteries, you can also use a car battery (or series of them wired in parallel) We do this at City Hall, where our phone system may need to be up much longer in case of a power failure and generator fault. We actually used marine batteries because of the much better seal on the batteries.

Oh, one piece of advice concerning testing UPS's. never ever ever plug a line tester ( a real one, not the little light test) into a UPS. Since a line tester is designed to sample how much amperage is available, it'll try and draw all the power at once. The UPS will happily oblige. The tester I was using got VERY hot in less than a second and all the magic smoke came out. Turns out it actually says in the tester manual not to ever plug it into a UPS, although 220 is fine.

Also, if you're in the US, be very careful not to buy an APC 420i or anything with an i on the end of the model number. I learned the hard way that this means International Version, I.E. 220. Nothing quite as embarassing as convincing a client to buy a UPS to protect their valuable server, getting your secretary to order one, plugging it in and all of a sudden a 4" flame shoots of the the (now dead) server. Luckily all it ate was the power supply and some dignity.