So, it’s important to create an action plan to keep your home or your business, or both, running during these possible future blackouts. Computers, external hard drives, home Wi-Fi networks, and more all feel the negative effects of an outage. It might be more cost effective for me to buy a pair a pair of UPS such as a 1000VA unit and 500VA unit and put the desktop on the larger and the monitor on the smaller to get a potentially longer running time.Losing power is never fun, but it can also seriously mess with your electronics, especially if you don’t have a battery backup. Enough to get things saved and shut down. I have them on a single 1500VA rated UPS but that only provides me with around 5 minutes of running time. For instance, I have a fairly powerful desktop computer system plus a 27-inch Dell monitor that draws a fair amount of power. In some cases, it may actually be beneficial to have more than one UPS especially if you have a large power drawing devices. One thing to think about is that you don’t have to put everything on a single UPS. According to their UPS selector, it states that I would only have about 19 minutes of running time with a 750VA rated unit when this past weekend my 500VA unit managed to run for two hours. For instance, I have a cable modem, firewall and wireless router all attached to an APC Back-UPS Pro 500 which is a relatively low 500VA rated unit. I will note that they tend to be a bit conservative in their estimates on how much running time can be supplied. This will walk you through what devices you want to put on a UPS and then determine what options may best suit what you are looking at. Instead, I recommend that people use a calculator system such as the by APC. It is not something that many people can easily figure out as most of their devices simply list watts and not VA. This is essentially a way of saying how much load can be pulled from the battery at a specific power level. They are generally rated by a something called VA or volt amps. UPS backups come in a variety of different battery capacities. This is important to consider as the size of the battery compared to the load on it determines how long the devices can be powered. The battery then continues to supply power to the electronics as long as it can supply sufficient output voltage at the requested load. In the event of the power grid issues, the first stage of the power system halts flow of power to protect the battery. In essence, the electronics are always receiving power from the battery which in turn is constantly charged by the power grid. This damage to the power supply generally is not fatal right away but can lead to erratic behavior of the device and premature failure of the power supply. The most common damage is caused to the power supply to our electrical devices as the voltage sags cause issues with the circuitry that attempts to regulate the different voltages that are required of internal components of the electronics. This is most obvious in lighting that tend to dim because of the reduced flow of electricity to the home. For someone like me that is writing all the time, this can mean some significant loss in work.īrownouts are actually much more damaging to your home electronics and computers because the power continues to flow to the computer but at lower levels than the equipment is rated to handle. The issue is less about damage and more about with potential data loss from any work you might have been doing on a computer that wasn’t saved prior to the power going out. Blackouts tend not to be very damaging on the equipment but they are extremely annoying as they tend to last longer than the other two. Blackouts are one of the more annoying power issues that can happen during the winter months due to rain, winds and snow.
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