Dodged a bullet..

[sultan1966]

UP

 

[pware]

We don't have a UPS but do have surge protectors on all computers, the NAS, router, printer, etc. We had a local power blackout last Friday night, the first one this year, but we were not using any computers at the time so no data was lost. We had not considered the need for a home UPS.

We have solar panels installed which would supply power if the blackout occurred during the day (but obviously not at night) and we will eventually get a solar battery added but only the most expensive ones will give you true uninterrupted power at the instant of a blackout. Most models have a short delay (a few seconds to a minute) before the battery is activated in a power failure.

 

[johnwhelan]

There are three parts to a UPS, the first is surge protection, the second is providing power for a certain period of time and the third is brown out protection which means it keeps the voltage high when the voltage drops. In Ontario Canada new builds must now have whole house surge protection to meet the regulations. They are much cheaper today than they were a few years age and can be added to on existing panel. If the indicator light shows on a surge protection device just carry on using it.

Providing power means the battery has to be working. I can't recall on brown out protection if it needs to be working or not. Brown out protection was more important with hard drives but some electronics are sensitive to volt drops as well.

Whole house power protection usually pays for itself in long life for things such as fridges and small appliances such as microwaves.

Cheerio John

 

[Forester1]

We used to use APC UPS units where I worked, and they worked very well. At first we tried Tripp-Lite, and it worked great the first time, and then never again after that. That's going back about 25 years ago now, so maybe they are better now, but we could not trust anything but APC.

 

[JCitron]

We have both Tripp-Lite and APC UPSs in our house. These devices are rated according to the wattage they will be handling plus some overhead. I have an APC 2000VA, or 2000 KW rating. Instead of writing Watts like they've done for a century, they now use Volt-Amperes instead. Without going into electrical engineering, Volts times Amperes is Watts, thus the VA!

Anyway, I determined this by adding up the total rated wattage for each of the devices I have that I want to plug into my UPS. With my stack of hard drives, PC and two displays, I'm around 30% based on the graph on the UPS. The extra overhead was accounted for when I also used to plug my Roland LX-17 digital grand piano into the UPS, but that's no longer in this room.

My brother has a Tripp-Lite in the basement for his setup. He got it on sale, otherwise he would've purchased an APC. It works similarly but without all the extra display features on it. His computer use is also a lot less with a PC, small NAS, and two displays. He got away with a 1KW UPS.

UPSs are not infallible. I had an older APC die on me after more than a decade of constant use. All it took was a severe storm to ruin it and it did damage my old PC due to its inability to stop a surge that also killed the UPS too.

If your UPS died, it could be due to the storms zapping something very badly, or it could've been overloaded. There's also the possibility that it was at the tipping point and fell over due to the storms hurting one of the components at an earlier time. The damage was enough to weaken the UPS so that the other power strip you plugged in was one too many that it could have handled fine before. It's hard to tell and please don't perform any forensics on the UPS even though it would be interesting. There are some very dangerous residual voltages inside that are held in various capacitors and inductors.

 

[johnwhelan]

Just a comment on APC, some APC cheaper APC UPSes I think they call them BACK, do not work with "Green" PCs, the since the sine wave isn't good enough. It is a known problem with APC since I purchased one then unplugged it at the wall and the PC died and their technical support said they just didn't work with all the newer PCs. Their more expensive lines are better but I've found Cyberpower to be reasonable.

Cheerio John

 

[HiBaller]

I like Cyberpower UPSs. My 1200w unit guards my two desktops and I have one on my entertainment system as well as my server down in the basement. We have had some real humdingers of thunderstorms here in Ohio and not a one of them has knocked out my UPSs. Touch wood.

Bill

 

[JCitron]

Just a comment on APC, some APC cheaper APC UPSes I think they call them BACK, do not work with "Green" PCs, the since the sine wave isn't good enough. It is a known problem with APC since I purchased one then unplugged it at the wall and the PC died and their technical support said they just didn't work with all the newer PCs. Their more expensive lines are better but I've found Cyberpower to be reasonable.

Cheerio John

Yup, I've seen that before. I definitely don't have one of the cheap ones. My APC unit has a display on it for monitoring the battery, line voltage, and other systems.