By the time you read this, sometime in May, Lent will be over. As I’m writing it in late March, Lent’s ~half over. I’m splitting the difference and going with an Easter theme for this piece. 
Back in February 2012, I bought a CyberPower CP825AVRG, one of several UPSs (uninterruptable power supplies) currently inhabiting my abode, on sale from Staples for $54.99. Here are some stock photos of it:
Aside from the inevitable couple of iterations of SLA battery replacements, it’s still going strong more than a decade later, through two subsequent residence (including one time zone) transitions, with one exception, which ironically has nothing to do with its battery-backup power output facilities. The four outlets along the left side in the first two earlier stock photos are both battery-backed and surge protected; the ones along the right only offer surge-protection support. And, unsurprisingly, the one in the lower right corner has seen the most unplug-and-replug use, due to its under-desk proximity-to-me.
The UPS problem
A few months back, I woke up one morning to find my iPad Pro’s battery only partially full, even though I’d as-usual plugged it into its USB-C charger the night before:
As mentioned before, I’ve owned this particular charger since mid-2019, so it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that it had finally “given up the ghost”. But on a hunch, driven by my admittedly obsessive thriftiness, I carried the charger, USB-C cable and iPad Pro over to an available AC outlet one room over, plugged everything in and…the tablet started charging.
If the problem’s not with the charger, it’s obviously with the outlet the charger’s plugged into instead, right? I confirmed this hypothesis by plugging the charger back into the UPS and wiggling it, wherein I could tell from the telltale “beep” coming from the tablet when charging was (now inconstantly) happening there. At least one of that AC outlet’s contacts buried deep inside the UPS was no longer making a solid connection with whatever was plugged into it.
The short-term solution
My initial workaround employed an intermediary short extension cord plugged into the UPS, with the charger (or anything else I might want to power at the time) plugged into that:
The aspired-for improvement was two-fold; the extension cord’s “female” connector end would bear the brunt of subsequent charger, e.g., unplugs and re-plugs, plus the added “earth ground” NEMA 5-15 prong on the “male” connector end would give the to-UPS connection more rigidity.
And my “hack” worked…for a while. But then the UPS’ AC connection to the extension cord started giving out, too, whenever I’d breathe on it (I’m exaggerating, but only a bit).
Opening the UPS up
At this point, I was about ready to give up on the CP825AVRG; I planned to put duct tape over the flaky AC outlet, along with taping a note to the UPS, and then donate it. After all, those CyberPower LE850G successors I’d mentioned in late 2022 were still sitting in their boxes awaiting their turns in the spotlight, and with slightly higher power output along with two more total outlets (one battery-backed, the other surge-only), to boot:
But like I said earlier, the CP825AVRG was otherwise still chugging along fine; it’s even supported by my Mac mini over USB for running-on-batteries alert purposes (note the connector in the upper right corner of this stock photo):
And have I already mentioned my admittedly obsessive thriftiness? Plus, hey, I’m an engineer; I’ll take any opportunity to tear something apart and satisfy my curiosity. So, one recent evening, I grabbed a screwdriver and, throwing caution to the wind (after unplugging the darn thing and waiting a few minutes for capacitive discharge, of course!), dove in:
Buh-bye, temporarily (hopefully), battery:
In addition to the (already removed) screw that held the battery compartment lid in place, six other deeply recessed ones keep the two case halves together. You know what comes next:
Let’s focus in on the half that we particularly care about:
Brian: My, what a big transformer you have!
UPS: All the better to magnetically voltage-convert with!
Ahem. Today’s attention emphasis is on the left side of the device, associated with the surge-only outlets (since, in contrast to the earlier “stock” shots, the UPS is now upside down). I was initially disheartened, thinking I’d need to disassemble the entire thing to get to them. But then, after moving some wiring out of the way:
I realize that above them was a black plastic panel held in place by three screws:
The culprit
That’s more like it. Our patient is the outlet in the lower left corner. Zooming in, you can see the particular contact (the lowest one) that’s now “stretched” and no longer makes reliable contact with whatever’s plugged into it:
Grab a pair of needle-nose pliers. Squeeze gently. And…voila:
The insides
This is not going to be a full teardown; I wanted to return the UPS to full functionality, after all, not send it to the landfill. But while I had it partially apart, I went ahead and snapped some more photos for your enjoyment. Here’s the right-side vertically-mounted PCB, front-to-back (as oriented in the earlier overview shots), inner side first:
Now for the other (outer) side of that same PCB, in the same front-to-back order:
Now for the inside of the PCB at the back of the device:
And, last but not least, the inside and outside of the PCB in the back left corner:
It’s alive!
All that’s left is to retrace my disassembly steps in reverse, plug everything back in, grab a just-in-case fire extinguisher (kidding…maybe…), hit the power button and…we’re back in business!
Keen-eyed readers may have already noticed, by the way, that I’ve already replaced the elementary diminutive extension cord previously in that lower-right AC outlet with a “splitter”:
similar to two others you’ll see already in use there, for augmented total-available-outlets purposes. And on that note, by the way, I’m not under any delusion that my “fix” will last through the remainder of the UPS’s otherwise-operational lifetime. The metal in that contact is already fatigued; it’s only a matter of time until it stretches back out of reliable-contact place.
“I use everything until it completely falls apart”
That all said, in closing I’ll share the intro to an article on Yvon Chouinard in the latest (as I write this) issue of National Geographic, which I saw the very day after my successful-for-now repair:
Yvon Chouinard laughs when he tries to remember the oldest piece of gear he owns. Perhaps it’s a piton he forged in the late 1950s, after he taught himself blacksmithing and started Chouinard Equipment, Ltd.? Or maybe it’s one of the rugged rugby shirts his next company, Patagonia, made for climbing? Possibly the “fleece” jacket prototype Patagonia built using toilet-seat-cover fabric, which has since become an outdoors icon?
“Almost everything I have is old,” says Chouinard, 86, grinning. “I use everything until it completely falls apart.” The Patagonia founder glances around the office of his Wyoming ranch—a pinewood house with a view of the Tetons that he and his friends built in 1976—then raises his hands to show that the sleeves of his faded plaid shirt are all in tatters. “My whole life has been pretty simple, really. I’m not a consumer.”
I’m no Yvon Chouinard. My life isn’t simple. And I’m definitely a consumer. But that all said, I’d like to think I still share at least a bit of his longstanding “dirtbag aesthetic”. Agree or disagree? Any other thoughts? Let me know in the comments.
—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the company’s online newsletter.
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