Due to living in the country and having slightly dodgy power I’ve always had a UPS system installed at home (actually 2 currently).     Currently I have a APC Smart-UPS 1500VA, and a Eaton Powerware 9120-700.

A lot of people underestimate the value of these, and think of them as non-essential items - but for me they are invaluable when you consider I lose power for around 5-12 hours a month as a raw average.   At one point earlier this year the power lines in the field behind the house took the power company over 2 weeks to repair (luckily they got my neighbourhood power back in around 24 hours with a emergency generator).

How do I use my UPS:

• The Eaton runs my DSL router and DECT phone basestation- and runs it for around 5 hours.   This means in most circumstances I can continue to work from home for the duration of my laptop battery as most power outages don’t outlast this & the laptop.   Most useful.
• The APC runs both my main server (blogged about at the start of this year - but looks truncated now) and desktop.    This lasts for an hour and a half of use of the monitor/server, and about 10 mins if the desktop is on (desktop is a monster gaming PC).   Basically this is to allow the server to run if I’m out for the short outages, and if I’m in playing games - to allow me to shutdown cleanly on the desktop.  The server shuts down automatically when 5 minutes of power remain in the battery.

Prior to having the above 2 UPS’s I had a single 1200VA Belkin.    It died about 2 weeks after its 3 year warrenty had expired.    The Belkin died completely and it was not just a battery replacement job sadly.    As I work in IT and had experience of both APC and Eaton products, I realised buying a main-vendor full sine-wave UPS with long life and user-replacable batteries may have advantages, hence managed to source one of the above UPS’s from a 2nd hand dealer, and the other I was given as a gift from a friend (as his firm was needing more capacity than 1500 VA).   Very nice indeed - and cost me less than a new Belkin in total (I paid £80 for the Eaton)!

The UPS’s don’t just cover me from the usual full outages, they also keep my approx £2500 of PC equipment safe from surges/spikes and short brownouts.

Time running on UPS due to power-cut this month according to apcupsd statistics on my Debian server:    71 minutes and 4 seconds - with 4 power outages total (one 60 mins, 3 of 2-3 minute length).

I would reccomend “smart-ups” and sine wave models over non smart basic models, as they can accurately model their battery time remaining as they run allowing accurate battery information over the years.    Also cheap UPS’s with stepped output are from my personal experiences not as reliable as major vendors sine-wave smarter models.

With internet-additiction being common - I wonder how many other addicts will start purchasing UPS’s to enable them to not suffer in awkward loss of power situations…

Do you have a UPS  ?