Behind The Battery Door
To access the battery compartment, you must first undo the two screws found on the bottom. Pull the half-panel down until it clears the side rails before you can lift the cover off. What you find in there is a pair of Leoch 12V 9Ah batteries. Their model number, DJW12-9.0, does not appear to be standard stock, and the closest match I could find on their site is the LP12-9.0.
There's no fancy battery pre-packaging or connector. The two batteries sit right there with cables going straight to their spade terminals.
Batteries Out
Getting those connectors on and off in the tight space over the batteries is more difficult than it should be. You have to twist the right battery out to access the positive terminal before you can pull the power source further out to unplug the yellow wire. Once that is done, you can remove the first battery and move the second one to the right slightly to unhook it from behind the front frame. After that, you can twist it out and repeat.
The sharp plastic molding around the cable holes bites into wire insulation and complicates the process. Smoothing the holes would also reduce wear on the wires' insulation.
Breakable Slot
If you were wondering about my comments that the UPS' base should be braced with more foam, this is why I said that. The middle of the battery door hooks into this tab from below to keep the door from bowing out. At some point during shipping, the box must have fallen on its side. Since there is no packaging supporting the middle of the panel, the batteries' weight broke the flimsy slot. You can see the plastic turn white in the inside corners from strain.
The tab and slot should have been thicker, and the slot split in two to limit leverage.
Battery Door
Irregular rib spacing causes the door to warp most visibly around the area with three vent rows when force is applied near the middle. That also happens to be where the bottom locking tab is located, and where the batteries might put the most force. Since the battery door is primarily held in place by a nice track at each end, the door should have had two wider longitudinal ribs to redirect lateral force from the batteries there.
Reinforcement through the rest of the unit is generally shallower, but still feels adequate against external forces when the unit is fully assembled.
Battery Power Levels
How do the Leoch batteries used in CyberPower's UPS stack up against the CSB batteries in APC's? If we scale CSB's specifications by 9/7.2 to extrapolate what a 9Ah CSB battery's performance would be like for a one-hour constant current discharge, we get 6.89A for CSB versus 6.24A for Leoch. Ah-to-Ah, CSB beats Leoch by 10 percent. Repeating the comparison with a 15-minute discharge rate, which is more representative of what a UPS might encounter powering a high-end gaming PC and related accessories, we get 20.6A for CSB versus 20.2A for Leoch. That puts CSB only 2 percent ahead. It looks like Leoch batteries should be on par with CSB's at medium to high loads.
With the regular user/buyer tour out of the way, it's time to get into the more interesting stuff.
Lost?
The left screw inside the battery compartment unlocks the front panel, which can then be lifted and pulled away, revealing a hidden screw hole in the top corner with no screw in it (at least on my unit). Was it accidentally forgotten? Deemed redundant due to the top sticker? Superseded by the sticker because the transformer's weight causes the screw mount to break?
Once the front and rear covers are out of the way, two tabs at the bottom of the battery compartment release the inner shell and top half of the housing. From there, you can gently pry it up while repeatedly tapping the top seam with a plastic screwdriver until the wide clips under the top of the cover disengage.
Peekaboo
And what do we find? One small power PCB with three small heat sinks, one small 5V power supply board for the USB ports, a modestly-sized phenolic board for the high-current components with a small FR4 riser for control logic and one large transformer. CyberPower's LX1500 is a much simpler critter than the old APC BX1000.
Behind The Rear Cover
Behind the outlets, we find a plastic cover. We also find that the live wire from the power cord goes through the breaker and then straight to protected outlets. While this may not seem like much, putting the MOVs half a meter downstream from the first device requiring protection via extra wiring can reduce their effectiveness by 100V or more due to the added resistance and inductance.
Remember when I said this UPS has too many "surge-only" outlets due to its thin wire gauge? It's time to revise that "it shouldn't have any" due to a sub-par implementation.
And what is that I see near the bottom-left corner?
Pinched
The live wire was cut too long, and instead of trimming it down to length before soldering it to the breaker, it was simply tucked between the battery compartment wall and rear cover. That's fine except for the part where the wire ended up straddling one of the screw cups and got pinched hard enough to visibly compress its insulation. When you tuck wires away, make sure you are not putting them where they may get crushed. Tape them down in a safe place if you have to.
Breaker Bad
CyberPower continues to impress, but not for good reasons. There's a 15A breaker on a power cord that should not be used to carry more than 13A. While two or three extra amps before tripping may not be enough to turn a cord into a safety hazard, it is still disappointing to see that CyberPower could not be bothered to use breakers that match the cord's UL rating. When you run 15A through a six-foot #16 power cord, it dissipates around 12W. This may not sound like much, but it is still enough to get noticeably warm, especially if the cord has limited airflow around it.
