With all of the recent advances in Lithium-type battery tech (e.g. 18650) it seems like a market opportunity to create a new, modern, small, smart UPS.
These low-end APC dinosaurs still use lead acid, and in my experience (with a solid utility over the past decade) outages are just as likely to be caused by battery failure than some kind of actual power outage.
If anyone wants to build something better, happy to chat further.
Main advantage of lithium-ion over lead acid is lithium-ion is more energy dense so you can have a smaller size at a smaller weight. Important if you're building cars, but the price premium probably isn't worth it if you're building another office box at commodity pricing.
Edit: Since we're armchair-building for a predictable, high-uptime application, failure modes might have an interesting advantage though. Any battery engineers know if lithium ion has more predictable or measurable failure modes? Yes, we've all seen the exploding hoverboards... I'm assuming theoretically well-built electronics.
It could possibly target the "Apple-esque" product category by using a smaller physical footprint to emphasize sleek looks, perhaps with a small sharp readout. The small size could be leveraged further by only attempting to provide power for a short amount of time, say 10 minutes, emphasizing and requiring USB connectivity to shutdown the protected computer at minute 9.
Lithium batteries have a much longer lifespan than lead acid, which would eliminate the need to replace UPS batteries every few years. They are also more power dense, so if the goal is just to keep a machine running long enough for a clean shutdown, you can get away with a smaller (energy and size) battery for the same load.
Portable power packs are crazy cheap these days. You can get a 20,000mAh pack for $45 quite easily. They are almost always Lithium Polymer based, and are very small and light. I have had one sitting in my bag for almost a year now and it still has most of its charge.
What I don't understand is why it would be so hard to just scale those power packs up a little bit and slap a normal 110 volt A/C plug on them? Wouldn't that essentially be a super efficient, light weight UPS?
I don't understand how lead acid has an advantage in recharge cycles? My lithium batteries can be discharged and recharged over 1000 times before they wear out, and they hold a charge for ages. My UPS with lead acid batteries, however, is practically useless after a single full discharge, and the batteries have to be replaced practically every year.
There is a reason we don't see lihion car batteries, or fork lift batteries as a default. (Yes, Tesla's are li-ion, but that's a scale where the weight savings begins to matter. Iirc those battery packs can't deliver peak amperage quickly or many times in their life, e.g. ludicrous mode.)
Additionally, li-ion has non-neglegable disposal costs, so I don't think it's fair to count that solely again lead acid batteries.
These low-end APC dinosaurs still use lead acid, and in my experience (with a solid utility over the past decade) outages are just as likely to be caused by battery failure than some kind of actual power outage.
If anyone wants to build something better, happy to chat further.