Repairing a Water-Damaged Battery Backup System

The team successfully revived a water-damaged battery backup, saving thousands in repair costs.

### Repairing a Water-Damaged Battery Backup: A Cost-Saving Adventure
* 🔧  When a gaming system failure caused water damage to a battery backup, the author decided against buying a new one, opting instead to **salvage parts from a shipping-damaged unit purchased for $500**.
* 💡  The plan involved **transplanting the internals of the damaged unit** into the original chassis, with the help of Tyan, who has a background in **mechatronics engineering**.
* ⚡  The investigation revealed that while the original unit had **high-voltage components**, the lead-acid batteries appeared to be **functional despite the water exposure**.
* 🔍  Upon inspecting the shipping-damaged unit, they found that some boards associated with the **interface and display were dry**, suggesting **potential compatibility for parts swapping**.
* 🔌  The team discovered blown fuses and other damaged components, indicating that the system had suffered **significant electrical failures**, potentially due to **water exposure**.
* 🛠️  After careful examination and reassembly, they powered up the unit, initially encountering **voltage issues**, but soon realized a **missed jumper connection** was the culprit.
* 🎉  Ultimately, the repaired unit powered on successfully, **saving thousands of dollars** and demonstrating the **value of resourcefulness** in electronics repair.
* 💰  The experience also sparked plans for future videos exploring the **economics of buying and fixing broken tech**, making this project both **educational and financially rewarding**.

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 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, Tyan, 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, assuming not to mention dangerous process of transplanting the hopefully working internals from the shipping-damaged unit into the, well, probably still good steel chassis of the original one. So we

can hope that's why I brought tinan. He's going to help make sure that I don't die today. Are you out your ug whip? Well, I am. Excuse me, what are you doing now? You can enter the rich takes to win a Hennessy Vasa rer 600 a go play disp a truck of $100,000 cash. Don't smash the car, smash the link in the description. 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 LTT store.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 uh, that would probably be really good. U Titan's background is what? Are you like mechatronics engineering? Yeah, yeah, so some mechanical, some electronics. Oh grief, yeah, lead acid batteries. He told me when he came in today that he was worried we might be doing the lithium-ion one. I was like, no, I know much better than to fool around with any lithium-ion battery. This 196 volts, it's pretty, pretty clear that some of these boards did get a little bit rough housed in shipping like this one. Yeah, that looks very distra. I've seen so

much worse than this. The outside is really bad. 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 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, right? 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 probating 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 ship-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 Rev 00p. See, even when you revise a product, that doesn't mean that you revise every component of the product. They may be completely intercompatibility, go wholesale complete change out, and then hope for the best. Depends on 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, I more 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 convent over this board, which is good. These holes are obviously the relay right there, breaker, and then there were also holes here. What's this? That's a

plug that. Oh, 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. Oh, really? 'Cause either they're connected or they're not connected, and they're connected. Ed, 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 okay, maybe some of the control board or what looks like a control board back here fried. Uh-huh. Oh, oh, oh, oh, 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 damage unit, and we are not getting a continuity beep on these units. This is input from the batteries to the inverter. Mhmm. This looks like it might be the ground return.

maybe no. 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. 'Cause 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 vas around on these.

traces, so you can just find traces on both sides, prep 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 'cause 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, get that cheddar. I know it doesn't matter 'cause 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, that'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, that's 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. Wo nice solder jaw eaten, that's quality. Didn't realize these were passs for the ball. Yeah, it took me a minute to figure that out too. They go into what look like gigantic chunky ground. It's, it's, they're essentially bus bars between the boards. So that's how they're getting lots of power in between the two boards without having turn 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 Sho. We thought the top was bad. Yeah, look giant capacitor Bank wa wa. Look at the size of the bleed resistors. Yeah, 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 'cause one breaker is a single phase of power, 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? Uh, 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 fuses blew. The system works. Oh yeah, okay, actually getting a close-up of the two fuses is probably interesting 'cause here's the noted 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 know why it's dead. Yeah, can 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. So, we may need this board to work. Yeah, like your IC is completely, yeah, different from mine. There's the crunch. Oh, that might be fine. Yeah, like it's, it's, 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, the side is super mangled on this one, yeah, for the input. So I guess we just leave all of that, 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 do a quick test 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, 7 or 600 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 ni. 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 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. Um, this one was unint. 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. Got to say, I kind of feel like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop a little bit here on this project. Uh, same. It's going too good. Okay, this cable was almost certainly supposed to be routed underneath, but um, 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, you sure? I'm used to having to carry around something heavy like this, you know, with your tiny hands. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Squeaky noises in electronics. Yay. Uh, BP volt out of range. UPS shutting off battery pack. Let battery pack the J of range, which is probably too low. Okay, oh, it's probably shutting itself off 'cause, because it's too low. Too low, yeah, which so with a wall plug, it's probably

fine. Let's get the cover on. Yeah, so all I got to 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 is like she's working but she's limping. He nothing beeped or was disastrous. Here goes the plot. I hear the UPS. Let's go have a look. Load knot powered emergency off 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 tyan. Oh did we do a dumb uh well we didn't. Oh no but I might have. See that little green RPO thing it's supposed to be jumpered. 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. Well, powered on already. Okay, hold on, it's saying please wait right now. It worked online mode. Boom, we're in. Oh, that was 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, go for it. Oh, it's alive. It'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 in. This is the fact that the 240-volt device on the other end, which is the 115-in TV, 'cause it's China. I just plugged it into a 120-volt 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 is 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 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 boop and boob 1 and 1 12,000 Watts no problem baby efficiency 87% I don't know if that's good but it's good enough for me and it's good enough to tell you why would I be working if I could be driving Hennessy's brand new Vel brother in Soul Lake City shut up Dennis wo Baja [Music] mode oh that sounds [Music] crazy oh my god did I just run over someone now we have the chance to win this truck home but our sponsor Rich

look at the new Hennessy world. How beautiful! Oh, it's actually salty. If this is not to your tastes, how about this gold-plated cyber truck? And this is real gold. I'm sure you will get all the attention you've been dreaming of. But rid, I'm more of a real gold digger. Oh, my Wick fine. You can take this bag of cash home with you instead. From now till September 13, you can enter the contest with no purchase needed or get more entries when you spent on the rich website. $1 equals one entry. Just make sure you use our Link in the description. Denn, how did you get into the car? I can't tell if I'm blessed or C. 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 $500 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.

Risking my life to save $5000

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


Linus Tech Tips

Salvaging a Battery Backup from a Shipping-Damaged Unit

The author's gaming system failed, causing water damage to their battery backup, which they plan to salvage.

They bought a shipping-damaged unit for $500, hoping to transplant its working internals into the original chassis.

With the help of a friend, they are cautiously diagnosing both units to determine the best course of action for a successful repair.

Troubleshooting Electrical Issues in a Construction Zone

The equipment was moved in during the house's construction, leading to potential intercompatibility issues between product revisions.

The inspection revealed no obvious disconnects, but there were concerns about blown fuses and possible water damage to the second board.

The technician emphasized the importance of checking capacitors rated 50 volts or higher for potential damage.

The discussion revolves around measuring voltage to ensure a component is de-energized, with a focus on the difference between AC and DC ratings for capacitors.

The use of metal screws and washers on a PCB raises safety concerns, while the design of bus bars and giant standoffs for power distribution between boards is noted.

The conversation also highlights the importance of fuses in preventing system failures and the discovery of multiple blown fuses as a common issue.

The circuit board showed signs of electrical damage and was soaked in water, rendering the fuse ineffective.

There was hidden shipping damage on another board, but it didn't appear to be critical.

The team decided to keep some components and not rewire much, aiming to put the board back together and power it on.

The team is working on a project involving a power unit with a broken conductor, using glass or sand to dampen the arc.

They power it up with a battery first, but the battery pack's voltage is out of range, causing it to shut off.

After addressing a missed jumper connection, they successfully power on the unit and plug in the PDU, ultimately saving thousands of dollars.

A Unique Approach to Cable Termination and a Car Giveaway

The speaker discusses the convenience of terminating a cable in the wall instead of using a makeshift solution.

They share their impressive power efficiency of 87% and humorously ponder their luck in life.

The video also features a car giveaway, including a gold-plated cyber truck and a bag of cash, with details on how to enter the contest.