On 2/17/2011 10:09 AM, HerHusband wrote:
I think the first question here is what's the overall mission
objective? I haven't had a UPS on any of my home computers or
routers. The only problems I've had are if the power goes out,
which is infrequent, I might lose whatever work I had open.
Even that isn't for sure, as many apps do timed saves of the
open documents, so you may only lose the last 15 mins.
I've never had a disk corrupted by the power failing, or
anything like that. Nor can I recall ever losing any document,
etc that I was working on that amounted to anything.

Consider yourself lucky... I went many years without a UPS for my
computer. Despite my rural location, we rarely have power outages. I've
always used high quality surge supressors, and backup regularly, so I
wasn't overly concerned about power surges either.

Unfortunately, power "fluctuations" are usually more of a problem than a
total outage, and I've lost both hardware and data because of them.

The typical situation is during wind storms where a tree falls on a power
line. It doesn't knock the power out completely, but cycles it on and off
several times a second, or drops the voltage way down (brown outs).

The first time it happened I lost a power supply. My system runs 24/7/365
so it could probably be said the supply was getting weak anyway, but the
cycling and voltage surges were too much for it and it finally died.

The second time the brown outs and power cycling occurred while data was
saving to my hard drive and it corrupted the drive. I had to reformat the
drive and (thankfully) restore from a backup. No physical damage that
time, but a lot of wasted time rebuilding the system.

We had a wind storm again a couple of months ago, and this time my
computer wouldn't boot up. I installed a new power supply, but it was
still dead. I pulled all PCI cards and got it to boot. Then I slowly
added them one by one till I found the one that had failed (thankfully it
was a tuner card I was no longer using anyway). Again, not a major
expense, but a lot of wasted time trying to track down the problem.

My computer runs non-stop recording TV shows, controlling our home
lighting, we use VOIP on the network for our phone service, and more. My
home business also relies on my computer being up and running at all
times. For me, the cost of a UPS was worth a little more insurance of
keeping things running when there are power issues. Or at least have
enough time to save files I'm working on and shut down cleanly.

I chose a Cyberpower CP1500PFCLCD UPS for a little over $200:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16842102134
&Tpk=Cyberpower%20CP1500PFCLCD%20UPS

Of course, we haven't had any power problems since I hooked up the UPS,
so I don't know for sure how it will handle similar power problems in the
future. However, it has already recorded a few hundred "events", and
kicks in to even out the power when my laser printers drop the voltage
when they first kick on.


Are you leaving consumer grade computer equipment running 24/7?

TDD