Hi, it’s Jon Sevel from CoastTec. Today we are going to talk about what you do when you get a unit back and it’s not turning on at all.

So today we are going to focus on a Smart UPS Rackmount, obviously by APC.

Here we have our little Smart UPS 1500 Rackmount 2U and we have plugged it in and pressed the button, but nothing happened.

We are first going to try what is called a cold start. A cold start is when you press and hold the button and wait to hear a beep. If you hear a beep, release the on button during the beep.

I’m going to press and hold the on button, listen for the beep. I didn’t hear one, so the unit will not cold start.

With the cold start not working, that tells us that there is something on the DC side or the battery side that is not connected. The unit won’t start without batteries hooked up to it.

We are going to simply remove the bezel and here you’ll see your battery connection right here. This is your main battery connection and obviously for us, it’s hooked. Untangle the cord and pop it in here. You can see that it fits into a mating plug. If and when you plug this in you might hear a spark so we can tell that it’s in. Pop that in; make sure it turns on here. When you hear the unit come on, that’s a good sign.  Press the on button and everything is good.

You plugged the connector in, but it is still not working. What we are going to do next is check the intro and battery connections.

There are 4 screws here to hold this tray in. We are going to take them out really easily. Disconnect the battery connect and pull the tray out. The tray is heavy; make sure that you support it from underneath. It takes a little wiggling.

Now, we are looking at the battery connections. Check the battery connections and we see that yes, one of the battery connectors came out. Sometimes this happens in shipping.  Go ahead and push that battery connector back on, make sure it clicks so that it’s on their nice and tight. Check that the rest of them are tight, and we are good to go and reassemble this.

All of the screws are in so go ahead and pop the battery connect back in. Turn it on, you’ll hear a click and are good to go.

In this other scenario, the cold start works. Again, try to cold start it and to remember press and hold the button until you hear the beep and release the button while the unit is beeping.  So, I’m going to press and hold and release and the unit starts up.

What that tells you if the cold start works is that something is wrong on the AC side of the unit or the power coming into the unit.  The battery is working, everything is good, but we are not getting power into the unit. We are going to check a couple of things:

The first thing we are going to check is we are going to check the input. Make sure the unit is plugged in and if it’s in the surge protector that the surge protector is on.  In this case the surge protector was off, so I’m going to turn it on and when you hear the unit power up, press the button and it’s good.

If the surge protector is good and it’s on you are going to have to go back your plug in the wall and make sure that plug in the wall is good either by plugging a lamp into it. If that’s not good, you are going to have to go back to your breaker panel and make sure that breaker is not powerless.

If the power and the breaker checked out, the last thing you’ll want to check is the back of the unit. At the back of the unit there is a breaker, that’s the input power breaker for the unit and you are just going to make sure that it’s not tripped. If it’s tripped, it will have white shelling on it. Just to make sure, press it once or twice to make sure it’s all the way in and seated. Now it should be set to work.

If you are still having problems, please give us a call here at CoastTec, 410-521-1000, we are here to help you.