My Anker power station, which I’m using as a UPS, stopped charging the battery. I watched the charge decrease over a couple of weeks, and when it got down to 78%, I figured I needed to do something about it. I poked around the ‘net, and found that someone had fixed the same problem with a firmware upgrade. So I tried that.
I initiated the upgrade from the iPhone app. It failed. The reason why it failed, I think, is that I had the router, WiFI access point, and Ethernet switch all plugged into the power station, and it turned off all the AC outlets during the upgrade.
But there was good news; when the boxes came back up, the batteries started charging.
A week or so later, I was lying in bed in the morning, thinking about reading a bit before I got up. I reached for my iPad, and saw that it had no internet connectivity. I connected to the hotspot on my iPhone, and thought about what probably went wrong. I suspected the Anker power station. When I got up, my suspicions were confirmed. The power station was unresponsive to the iPhone app, and none of the devices connected to it had power.
I plugged all the important devices into a UPS with lesser battery capacity, unbent a paper clip, and reset the Anker power station. That appears to have fixed things.
I upgraded the firmware to 1.4.3, which is the current version. But I don’t think I can trust the Anker box to be the UPS I count on to keep the basic infrastructure running in the event of a power failure. This is the first UPS I’ve ever seen that stopped providing power to the AC outlets when there seems to be no hardware issue.
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