He asked me if I'd be willing to take it apart and see if I could figure out what was wrong with it.
I said 'sure', took it home, removed the cover, and found that both of the two 12v batteries were fried (one was outputting 2.7v, the other 4.9v, and both were bulging on the sides and top).
It took me about 15 minutes of cursing and digging around to find a 9/32 wrench to remove the retaining brackets, top circuit board, and front panel in order to remove the batteries for replacement.
Just to make sure it was the batteries before spending $55 on replacing them, I removed the batteries from my own Belkin 1500VA UPS to test his unit with.
My UPS was designed with battery replacement in mind, so all I had to do was slide the front cover down, disconnect the power leads, and slide the batteries out of the unit.
Much easier than mucking around with removing a boatload of screws, brackets, wire harnesses and potentially electrocuting myself if I got careless.
Anyway, it worked fine with my batteries connected, so we bought replacements at the local Batteries Plus and now the unit is as good as new.
The moral of the story is that unless you're somewhat knowlegable, safety minded, and comfortable with taking apart AC powered systems, when you buy a UPS, be sure that it's designed so that the user can easily swap out batteries without exposure to potentially dangerous current.
Pic of his partially dismantled UPS:
UPS
The real irony was that his three year warranty expired in May.
Talk about timing...
As an aside, I have an APC Back-UPS Pro 280 that I bought back in 1994 that is still going strong.
I replaced the original battery back in 2001 and in 2005 I relegated the UPS to laptop duty when I bought the bigger Belkin.
It may not be enough to power today's desktop systems and it doesn't have either a serial or USB port for PC power management, but it certainly is good enough to protect my laptop.
