How Vital is UPS These Days for Personal Home Computers?

Boris_yo

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 22, 2011
Messages
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I wonder how many people on this forum have UPS these days.
What's the worst that can happen with power outage?
I have sometimes power outages, like 1-2 per month where
some last hours and some last a few moments.

I use surge protection socket and sometimes when there are
power surges it cuts power supply to my computer for 5 minutes
standby.

I wonder if surge protector is enough to prevent hardware damage.
I am building a new PC and I don't have budget for UPS and its
requirements to replace battery every few years.
 
I've been using APC Back UPS RS-1500 since 2004.Replaced the battery twice so far.
It is not about running the PC for 30+ minutes in case of a power loss, it is about mitigating power spikes and drop that happen multiple times a day.

As for the budget, I spent ~$120 on UPS during black friday sale and 2x $75 for batteries. That's about $1/month since the purchase.
 
The UPS has been a vital part of my system, down in Texas where I live I had been hit directly by three major hurricanes and never had a issue with brown outs or spikes. According to my neighbor who is the transmission manager for our utility company he tells me that the phase is the only thing they must lock (60Hz), voltages are not tightly regulated due to many conditions. Beware of Walmart big box surge outlet strips they are junk, get an isobar around 100 USD. Need one of these for lightening protection have a similar one on my SDR antenna line.
https://www.goldmine-elec-products.com/prodinfo.asp?number=G18997

Isobar link https://www.amazon.com/Tripp-Lite-P...9508134&keywords=isobar&qid=1573746429&sr=8-3
 
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
I lost a system in the late 90's to brown outs. Been using UPS's ever since.

Even have them for my modem, router, tv too
 
Here's the thing - you have to consider the cost of replacing your system (or expensive parts of it) vs the amount of money an UPS costs (about a hundred bucks).

Every system I have is hooked to one as well as critical equipment like modem and routers. Plus, I usually migrate my older UPSs to less critical systems as I buy new ones and add them into the hardware collection.
 
The UPS has been a vital part of my system, down in Texas where I live I had been hit directly by three major hurricanes and never had a issue with brown outs or spikes. According to my neighbor who is the transmission manager for our utility company he tells me that the phase is the only thing they must lock (60Hz), voltages are not tightly regulated due to many conditions. Beware of Walmart big box surge outlet strips they are junk, get an isobar around 100 USD. Need one of these for lightening protection have a similar one on my SDR antenna line.

Good old Texas electrical service. I'm in Central Texas and our neighborhood is unfortunate in that it was built in 1985 and has a weird power trunk forked off a main power trunk over a mile away, so any little thing that goes wrong with the line results in our neighborhood blacking out. But the neighborhood up the hill from us built around the same time has a two way feed, as do the neighborhoods around us built in the last 15 years so they rarely go out. So we'll be sitting here in the dark for hours and sometimes days while they all have power which is very annoying. The power company always takes their sweet time getting us up and going again.

I started buying UPSes in the early 2000s after a series of surges blew up thousands of dollars in computer equipment, both from the crap power service and lightning strikes. Also unfortunate for us is that we're the last house on the street, so any surge on either the mains or cable line blows something up. Fortunately it usually just takes out the UPS or cable modem now and it's cheaper to replace those than all of my electronic gear.
 
It is as vital as a quality power supply is. I don't even consider using one without the other.

A UPS should ALWAYS be used with a PC/Server.
 
Unless you have a whole-house system (and some of those have a transition time with no built-in buffer) then main PC and networking gear gets a UPS. No power grid is perfect, and weather does what it wants.

Because fuck downtime, it always strikes when you're in the middle of doing shit.
 
I still use them. Had a couple units die and need to replace them, so currently only on the file server and primary network gear. Isobars go on anything important for the most part. They won't protect from brownout or anything but they do clean up the noise a little and seem to do a good job protecting hardware.

I need to replace the ones on my desktop, but got lazy or complacent because where I used to live had one power outage that I know of in the 3+ years I lived there. That one was interesting because it was the middle of the night, the UPSes woke me up and the city was black.

Now where I live it seems relatively common. I had one day, perfectly nice sunny day with no wind or anything, and there were at least a dozen short outages. I think it happened a couple of times, to the point I thought maybe it was a house issue and the place was going to burn down lol.
 
Unless you have a whole-house system (and some of those have a transition time with no built-in buffer) then main PC and networking gear gets a UPS. No power grid is perfect, and weather does what it wants.

Because fuck downtime, it always strikes when you're in the middle of doing shit.

Or a solar setup with back up batteries.
 
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