Mask Off
The BR1000G doesn't look as sexy with its face bitten off, which makes me glad I managed to salvage the makeup job I'll reapply later.
How many hidden screws do you see? Three? That’s what I thought too, until I tried prying it apart and realized that there was a fourth one hidden between the leftmost two buttons up top.
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First Peek
Similarities with the BX1000 end here. Instead of an HVDC stage followed by an output bridge and a separate AVR auto-transformer, the BR1000G has an AVR transformer driven directly from battery voltage to generate the AC output. APC ran out of space to fit all of its functionality on the main board and had to go with a mezzanine arrangement.
Terminal To Nowhere
This grabbed my attention upon removing the cover: what is a wire with an eyelet crimp connector doing attached to a plastic pin on the side of the battery compartment?
Making Sense
After digging everything out of the UPS’ body, it turns out that this wire is actually two wires with a long piece of heat-shrink tubing on top. The eyelet terminal was used merely to increase the temperature sensing element’s effective surface area. As far as I can remember, this is the first time I have opened a UPS equipped with battery temperature monitoring.
Staked
While the top, bottom, and inner sides of the battery bay are screwed to the bottom/left half of the housing, the rear is permanently attached by welding the plastic stakes or stems to the bay. It seems odd to go through the trouble of setting up a plastic (fiber-reinforced ABS) welding station and then only using it for two out of six attachment points between the same two pieces.
Fan Not Included
Between the iron core transformer and mezzanine board, there is a vacant 40 millimeter fan holder molded into the side of the battery bay. Does this mean that a fan was originally planned but ultimately found to be unnecessary, or are the molds shared with a different product that does require a fan?
There's also an unpopulated three-pin connector labeled “J25” next to the two current-sensing transformers, which coincidentally carries the “FAN” function name on its perimeter. Smells to us like APC is reusing the exact same boards for the 1300 and 1500 VA models, give or take a few component additions, substitutions, and firmware modifications.
Breaker
If you guessed that there would be a 15A breaker behind the rear panel, you were correct.
There's a mess of wires back there. The master outlet requires its own line for current sensing, and the master-controlled outlets also require separate wiring. As a result, we find a total of 10 wires between the outlet strips and main board. Thankfully, all wires have connectors and all connectors are labeled by wire color on the main board.
Outlet Strips
One last attribute the BR1000G carries over from APC's BX1000 is its ground contact strips: instead of simple bent flaps or torque fingers, they get the same pinchy finger treatment as the live and neutral strips (albeit with a smooth arc shape instead of straight bends). That’s how proper ground strips should be made.
RF Surge Protection
In one of my SurgeArrest Performance tear-downs, I commented on the lack of shielding behind the RF surge protection module. APC responded that its design met the requirements without a shield. Here, though, the RF module does have a small shield that clips to the front part through two thin slots in the PCB.
There isn't much circuitry underneath; the signal trace goes almost straight from input to output. We find what must be the leads of a TVS diode or equivalent device under the top shield and a trace width change in-between on the bottom layer.
Ethernet Surge Suppression
Doesn’t that look like a cute little board? Instead of using 16 discrete 1N4007 diodes as we've seen in the past, this one uses four Fairchild MB1Ses (100 V, 0.5 A forward current, 35 A surge) for steering surges around the circuit; an ST-branded component with an unreadable model number that could be a zener, SIDAC, or DIAC type device; and a pair of S2MA diodes (1 kV, 1.5 A) isolating the Ethernet circuit from ground. There is also a spark gap cutely labeled “GDT1”.
For a network surge to get shunted to ground, it has to exceed the S2MA diodes’ 1 kV breakdown voltage and the spark gap’s ~700 V.
