When one of my gaming systems spectacularly failed dumping water down the entire rest of the rack,
the most expensive piece of equipment I lost was this battery backup.
Now the obvious thing to do when a piece of uh high voltage electrical equipment gets doused
in water would be to buy a new one, but I have a better plan. You see battery backups are expensive
and one of the most important parts, the lead acid batteries
seem to be working just fine. No, that isn't how I checked them. To eBay I went and while I could
have bought a lightly used unit sans battery, it was this shipping damaged one that caught my eye.
Hey Tyman, have a look at what we're going to be working on today. Oh boy. Specifically it is
thousands of dollars worth of shipping damage. I got this unit for just 500 bucks meaning that it
could very well be worth the time consuming, not to mention dangerous process of transplanting the
hopefully working internals from the shipping damaged unit into the uh well probably still good
steel chassis of the original one. So we can hope. That's why I brought Tynan. He's going to help make
sure that I don't die today. From my point of view there's two options. We can look at the original
unit and try and diagnose what exactly in it may or may not be dead or we can look at the new unit
which I have about 12 days to inform the seller if it doesn't work and we can determine if we think
there's even a chance that transplanting those parts in here is going to make this fully functional.
Let's open up the shipping damaged one. If only there was some way to remove these fasteners.
Like a screwdriver from LTTstore.com. Now I have to confess to you I did something bad. I did open
up the original one to have a look at it. I didn't touch anything which is very important because
more than anything else we've ever done. Folks do not try this at home. This is high voltage,
high current electrical equipment. There are capacitors in here that if you touch them you will
die. And the batteries. That too. Oh yeah I fooled around with the batteries too. That's why I'm
pretty sure that they're working but if you wanted to validate that for me then that would probably
be really good. Tynan's background is what are you like mechatronics? Mechatronics engineering.
Yeah yeah so some mechanical, some electronics. Oh grief. Yeah let us have batteries. He told me
when he came in today that he was worried we might be doing the lithium ion when I was like
no I know much better than to fool around with any lithium ion battery this. 196 volts. It's pretty
clear that some of these boards did get a little bit rough housed in shipping like this one. Yeah
that looks very destroyed. I've seen so much worse than this. The outside is really bad and you can
tell this thing took some bangs. Yeah. But like most of it looks fine. What's safe to touch?
Like these wires for sure. Yeah. This shroud probably maybe depending what's under it. Everything's
probably safe but we'll double check. Boards designed like this should have bleed resistors on
any of the big capacitors so they should discharge in a safe time but you don't want to assume that.
How do we check? Looks like there's a whole bunch of touch points on
a lot of the main traces that should be able to be measured. Before you get to probulating
those should we change gears and have a look at the water damaged one to see if there's any
clues as to what we may or may not need to salvage. For sure. This could be good because
what's missing from the shipping damaged one is all of the boards associated with the interface
and the display which I mean clearly didn't get at least much water on it. Does anything jump out
at you immediately here? It's really dusty. We moved all the equipment in while the house was
kind of still a construction zone. That's on me. I think I noticed something. The new one is Rev03
and the original one is Rev00P. See even when you revise a product that doesn't mean that you
revise every component of the product. They may be completely intercompatible other than they had
to change a supplier for a part and they just revved it so that they could keep track of that.
In terms of immediate water damage things the circuit breakers obviously got dunked on so that
may be a problem. Tell me this. What would be your methodical way to approach something like this?
Would you replace one part and try to fire it up or would you just go wholesale complete change out
and then hope for the best? How much time we have. Probably first thing is figuring out if there's
anything obvious that's not connected that's supposed to be. Everything should be connected. I
haven't actually touched anything in here because I knew that I was out of my depth. Yeah and we're
meant like shorts or disconnects. Oh sure other possible spots are over the fan here in fact you
can see where the water drips were coming through here. There are no holes conveniently over this
board which is good. These holes are obviously right there and then there were also holes here.
What's this? That's a plug. That should not be a problem. Okay and then these holes were over the
battery compartment which survived and is now completely dry. This happened over a month ago
now and it seems fine. I don't think the breakers are damaged to the point where it would matter
because either they're connected or they're not connected and they're connected. Oh balls.
It's probably not going to be an easy fix. There's a chance that there's
like some of the fuses for the inputs blue or maybe some of the control board or what looks
like a control board back here fried. Oh could this be as simple as a safety feature working for
safety and our fuse blue? Quite possibly. Hey blown fuses. We know this because we're getting
a continuity beep on the shipping damaged unit and we are not getting a continuity beep on these
units. This is input from the batteries to the inverter. This looks like it might be the ground
return. Nope what is that for? What I'm gathering is you don't want to just put the new fuses in
because then we don't have backup fuses if they blow. Depends on how dangerous you want to live
because yeah we have one attempt at these fuses not blowing again. Right. We should probably take
these out of the chassis. Okay I can do that. Cool I'll do that one. One of the things I am
concerned about for this is the second board underneath which may have been water damaged
more than we can see here and this other fuse looks like it goes straight down. Whenever you're
looking at an electrical system like this for capacitors you want to look for anything that's
50 volts rated or higher. I would recommend checking everything but those are the ones you
really want to look for. 275. So we want to check the big oh I didn't even see that one big and
then you want to see look for the two sides of the capacitor. In this case there's a whole bunch of
vias around on these traces so you can just find traces on both sides, probe across it and you
just want to see that it's zero or close to zero. Now I noticed you have this set to volts DC but
this says it's rated for 275 volts AC. Yeah capacitors are rated differently for AC versus DC
depending on the type but when you're trying to make sure something's de-energized you want to
measure DC because AC can't exist when it's unplugged. I'm excited they never let me play with
stuff like this. That's why I'm here. My only thing is that if I ever die on camera I expect
the company to monetize it to get that cheddar. I know it doesn't matter because they design
around it but it always sketches me out when you screw a metal screw with a metal washer directly
onto a PCB. I just don't like it. Well it's probably a good thing they can cause fires sometimes
while I was doing some research for this shoot I found a nice eaten handbook that I found
extraordinarily entertaining. Oh. Super professional. Oh my god. Professor Watson. I love him. The
particular page that really got me was this one. Nine ways beer and UPS's are alike. Okay.
Here she comes. Oh perfect I can look at that now. Okay I'm not going to break anything.
Nice solder job eaten. That's quality. I didn't realize these were pastures. Yeah it took me a
minute to figure that out too. They go into what look like gigantic chunky ground pins. It's it's
there's essentially bust bars between the boards so that's how they're getting lots of power in
between the two boards without having to own wires. It's kind of funky though that they just use
giant standoffs. I mean metal's metal. Yeah and if it's metal then it's metal but like.
And they're brass. Look at this shmoo. Oh I mean. We thought the top was bad. Yeah look
giant capacitor bank. Whoa. Whoa look at the size of the bleed resistors. Yeah.
Before we tear them both completely apart what are the odds that the short in the breaker
would have caused those fuses to blow? It would have had to have been a short between the breakers
because one breaker is a single phase of power. Yeah. So it would have to short across two phases
for those to blow and in theory these should break if anything downstream of them fails.
But if that were true then why would you need fuses anyway? Because you're dealing with enough
power that if something goes wrong your board's going to melt. Right. Your hands are small right?
Oh yeah. Cool. That's my superpower. I will need your small hands to get that exact connector out.
Uh all right cool. I think it's dead. It looks like it's dead. I call dead.
Oh yes. Okay we found another dead fuse this time on the bottom board.
Huh all the fuse is blue. The system works. Oh yeah okay. Actually getting a close-up of
the two fuses is probably interesting because here's the not f***ed one. Oh yeah. Oh there's
your problem. Hey we found it. We were looking at the top. Yeah that's not good. Okay. That's very
not good. Okay well no that's great. Now I don't know why it's dead. Yeah. I actually see where some
of the electricity was breaking through the solder mask around the edge of the trace. Oh cool. That
would have uh electrolyzed the water. So this fuse probably tried to save everything else but
it was completely soaked in water and never stood a chance unfortunately. Thank you for your service.
I found some more hidden and sneaky shipping damage on one of the boards that got a little bit
crunched. Oh. It doesn't look like it's damaged. It'll impact anything but I'll be taking a closer
look at this board after we get it out. Okay I have bad news. I believe this is a different revision
than the one that's in here. Yeah. So we may need this board to work. Yeah. Like your IC is
completely different from mine. There's the crunch. Oh that might be fine. Yeah like it's
probably fine. That might just be a ground or something right. I'm not taking everything out
of here because we decided that we were going to keep the receptacles and also uh. This side is
super mangled on this one. Yeah for the input so I guess we just leave all of that. Yeah. Which is
kind of convenient because it means we're not actually rewiring that much. So is this it? Yeah
I think we just put it back together. Okay good luck everybody. Now under normal circumstances
I would absolutely look at something like this and I'd go oh man let's just let's do a quick test
boot of it you know on the bench but we can't. We don't even have a way of connecting the top
board to the bottom board without screwing the whole thing together anyway. Also from a safety
standpoint this chassis protects us from even if we're careful accidentally touching something
that we really don't want to touch. Yeah there were I think seven or six hundred volt caps under here.
Looks like I'm now ready for board number the two. No way. Yeah. I've got my breakers almost in.
Dude this is going so fast. Yeah. We're going to plug this whole thing back together. It's going
to turn right on. We're going to be like damn we're really good at this. And it was totally worth it.
You know we've actually got a couple of videos coming soon on the economics of you know buying
broken stuff on ebay and fixing them. We bought a half a dozen cpus and then I think we bought a
bunch of motherboards. Then we're going to compare to the median us wage and see if we could make a
living just like buying things on ebay and fixing them. This one was unintentional this was more
just I really really really really really didn't want to buy another one. I don't know exactly why
these are directional but I do see what looks like a diode marker on them which implies it's
designed to go in a particular direction. Oh. Generally with these when they break
they're high enough voltage that it'll maintain an arc even if the conductor has broken so they're
filled with glass or sand that act to damp out the arc that's created. Okay here's your orientation.
Cool. Gotta say I kind of feel like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop a little bit here on
this project. Same. It's going too good. Okay this cable was almost certainly supposed to be
routed underneath but it makes it which means that's the last screw. What's your confidence level?
Honestly pretty high. Now I have an idea. Okay. I was thinking we power it up with just the battery
before actually plugging it into the wall. Sure. Okay. Do you need help? No. Sure. I'm used to having
to carry around something heavy like this you know. With your tiny hands? Yeah yeah yeah.
Squeaky noises and electronics. Yay! BP volt out of range. UPF shutting off. Battery pack.
Let battery pack hold the dead range. Which is probably too low. Okay. Oh it's probably shutting
itself off because it's too low. Too low. Yeah. Which is fine. So with a wall plug it's probably fine.
Let's get the cover on. Yeah.
That's all I gotta do is slide her in. I was about to say that's the last thing that's broken. I
forgot my son's gaming rig. It's like she's working but she's limping. Okay. Nothing beeped or was
disastrous. Here goes the plug. I hear the UPS. Let's go have a look. Load not powered.
Emergency off. It says battery pack voltage out of range but we measured the voltage at about 200
and on the top of the unit it says nominal pack voltage is 180 volts so that should be fine.
Yeah. Dude, timing. Oh did we do a dumb? Ah well we didn't. Oh no. But I might have.
See that little green RPO thing? It's supposed to be jumpers. Oh yeah it is. I know the thing.
I've meant to put that back in. Yep that's important. After painstakingly paying super
careful attention to everything we did internally I think we just were like oh we put it back together
let's go test it and I think we might have just missed that jumper and that might be it.
All powered on already. Okay hold on it's saying please wait right now. It worked. Online mode boom
we're in. Oh that's terrible. That sucked. Yeah let's go. She's on. Load protected online mode.
Okay okay yeah yeah yeah I'm plugging the PDU in. Okay okay go for it. Oh it's alive.
He's drawing the power. Yeah this right here this is the face of a guy who just saved thousands of
dollars. Ah freaking awesome. Time to get everything plugged back in. Probably the worst thing that I've
been doing lately. No no it's not even this is the fact that the 240 volt device on the other end
which is the 115 inch TV because it's China. I just plugged it into a 120 fold outlet and I was like
I don't know maybe it's going to be fine. My understanding is it does put additional strain
on the power supply but shouldn't kill it immediately so I'm going to be powering my TV properly now.
Properly. Well properly-ish. You know you can just
re-terminate the plug onto the actual cable instead of Jerry rigging the cable to another
cable right? Um yeah but this was convenient because I think the cable was already in the
wall or something I don't know. Yeah you you can terminate it to the cable that was in the wall.
Yeah I don't know there was a reason I did it that way I can't remember what it was. Okay boop boop boop boop
and boop. One and a half thousand watts no problem baby efficiency 87 percent. I don't know if
that's good but it's good enough for me and it's good enough to tell you. I can't tell if I'm
blessed or cursed you know. Both. Like the water the random corrosion wouldn't have happened to
someone who was blessed right but then someone who was cursed couldn't have possibly gotten a UPS
of that caliber for five hundred dollars. And conveniently had someone on staff who knew how
to rebuild it. Well yeah that too. If you guys enjoyed this video maybe go check out part one
where the bulk of the diagnosis of the leak itself took place. Hey do you want to see the
fitting. Yes.