My BX750MI-GR has saved my precious data on two occasions. Earlier this year, my seven year old, well used waffle iron shorted, popping loudly and sparking quite brightly in the process, probably because of all the gunk that had accumulated inside its less cleanable interior over the years. That not only made my breaker trip, but also blew the 16 amp main fuse. The UPS kicked in immediately, making a klick and a beep, which felt amazing. That was my first time ever.
As for the second time, see this post.
I used to live in a house with 1800s ceramic wiring in the walls. You bet a.UPS saved my setup more than once. I have 3 now.
I’ve had my current one long enough that it became a fancy surge protector/filter/isolated circuit until I replaced the battery. Made power flickers go from rage inducing to minor annoyance.
The other day, it saved my progress in a game I was playing when the breaker tripped from the toaster oven and freezer cycling on at the same time as me playing a game. Thought the power was out so I quickly saved and exited the game before realizing the other circuit the kitchen doesn’t share with the living room was still powered.
They are nice enough that I’m considering replacing from my own pocket the one my ISP provided with the fiber modem but said they don’t support anymore when its battery died so that my internet doesn’t take a few mins to come back up when it is a power flicker. It feels great to be playing an online game through a power flicker that resets clocks but didn’t even disconnect me from my game.
It’s also nice to not have to worry about the quality of the power coming through the wall since my UPS generates its own AC waves and only uses the input power for the energy, not the phase. That has probably saved me from mystery crashes without me even noticing.
Before this moment I had never heard of a UPS.
Hi. Computer guy here. How many times has a UPS saved me/my clients’ machines? Too many to count- BUT
I do have a story of a UPS absolutely ruining my day if anyone is interested.
I do have a story of a UPS absolutely ruining my day if anyone is interested.
Don’t be a tease. Type out the story!
Okeydoke.
Walk in to my office one day, see the shop lights flickering. Not flashing- pulsing, like someone’s playing with a light switch as fast as they possibly can. “Uhoh, that can’t be good.” During the afternoon, lights flickered repeatedly over and over, in a kind of pulse- like half the waveform disappeared, over and over every maybe 15 minutes or so. I’m no electrician but I think a transformer down the road was in the process of exploding, dropping out a phase maybe?
Each time, our big APC unit with 8x addon battery packs slaved to it- (About 15U worth of rackmount battery packs) the relays cutting to battery and back to AC cycled so fast each time, a professional heavy metal drummer would have been impressed. Horrifying sound to be honest.
After this a handful of times, it happened again and this time, the APC spewed white sparks out the back of the main unit, about 4-5 feet, which meant it was blasting the plaster behind it with sparks bright enough to see them bounce off the wall and roll on the floor. I’ll be honest it looked like welding sparks and the back of the server rack looked like a fireworks show. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this expression before, but I was “shitting purple twinkies”. Full blown panic. Brain couldn’t even compute what I was seeing.
That was the day we lost about $6,000 worth of battery backup for my office’s server rack.
INB4 “But why didn’t you go to the manufacturer for help after?” I did. APC gave us a mind-melting great offer: gigantic discount for the replacement unit, shipped for free (these things come on pallets by the way) but my drooling idiot of a boss decided calling the insurance company and getting an incredible deal from APC for a direct replacement was “too much effort”. Instead he ordered some “normy” 1500’s. We went from ~ 10,000VA of battery backup down to 2,000. Used to be we could stay up/online for hours worth of outage. Now maybe 45 minutes.
At least they’re cheap to replace cells in. Urgh.
Edit: forgot to mention, it spared our gear, none of these insane power events reached their power supplies.
Did you find out what happened to the mains afterwards? Curious about what would cause crazy flickers like those you described.
Oh, do tell what happened that day?
Replied below :)
I worked as a Broadcast Manager on cruise ships and UPS banks saved our gear more times than i can count. Shipwide blackouts (and tests) are not fun things to recover from, and UPS banks acted as a buffer countless times.
Lightning hit the transformer outside my old wartime era apartment complex.
The sound my ups made was like a thousand angry bees.
All of my lights and fuses were blown and the ups battery melted.
But all my equipment plugged into it was fine.
Even UPSs have their ups and downs.
I have UPSs between the wall and every expensive electronic in my house.
I think I have seven or eight now.
You must be surrounded by some real sweet transformer hum 💗
Mine are basically silent.
Sure silent in the audio spectrum but what about RFI? I put ferrite chokes on all the things.
Sic. What brand?
Cyberpower
my lab has oscillating power at some locations, UPS gives stable voltage and we have not had a power supply blow since.
Recently bit the bullet and finally bought one. Mostly to ensure my PC’s components don’t get slowly damaged by power fluctuations now that my RAM sticks are worth a significant chunk of what I bought my fucking car for, but the trigger was my cat stepping on the PC’s power strip switch a few days after my house randomly lost power (which both happened while I was using the computer, of course)
The main thing I’m worried about is a power surge anymore frying my electronics, having good surge protectors are imperative. I tried a UPS for a time and saw no real benefit to it save once the power went out, it allowed me to stare at the computer for a few minutes before remembering the local networking equipment also needs power.
Windows isn’t like what it was back in the XP days. It prioritizes any system writes immediately instead of holding them in memory with an edit flag on them until it gets its step in queue. This is what would lead to your OS dying after a power failure because it was holding a system file for modification. As well as fewer and better HDDs there’s less issues with concerns of head crashes on sudden power loss that it cannot reset to home.
So modern Windows mounts its filesystem for synchronous I/O by default? Don’t we need to manually sync, as with external drives? I haven’t used Windows for a long time, so I’m out of the loop.
Not fully certain, it’s been a long while since I have had to learn and know the nuts and bolts of how Windows file systems works. From some brief reading it’s made to be able to quickly and (mostly) seamlessly work with multiple devices. Save on your computer, changes will be accessible on our phone near immediately. It’s made for better file resiliency and portability.
So you have it set to sync certain files to an external drive, plug it in only once a while to do the back up, it should afford the same expedited updating as it does now. The corruption of unplugging it too soon is diminished as well. When it finishes with a write like that from experience, it’s truly finished. I still tell it to stop the USB device out of habit but it’s not going to kill the entire drive doing so like it could with XP.
Low power is as bad as a surge. Most UPS also act as power conditioners.
I have two APC550s that are powering my computers only and not the displays or peripherals.
Voltage spikes and brownouts are a constant thing where I live, the variation is enough to play holy hell with the modem and wifi so to save my sanity, every electronic device is attached to something that backs up or cleans up the power.
For the laptops, I have them attached to straight power conditioners (isotel 4s) so at least the adapter blocks won’t get messed up.
Given my main computer is a 2008 MacPro, running an unsupported modern macOS install and the thing’s been running constantly for at least a year now (it’s asleep ATM) I’m not complaining. Same for my gaming PC…
The hardware I have owes me nothing.
Mad respect to you for respecting your hardware.
powering my computers only and not the displays or peripherals.
Same here. :)
Me too! Mostly because mine only has IEC outlets and came with a single female to male IEC cable though, and I still haven’t gotten around to getting an extra one for my main monitor.
I have an old one. The battery is dead, I could replace it, but I didn’t really see the value. Power going out isn’t a terrible thing in my view, it happens so rarely for me. It’s a time to reflect and choose simpler activities.
The habit of saving early and saving often is so ingrained, I’d not lose more than a few minutes of effort on whatever I might be doing at the time that’s mildly important to me.
It’s a time to reflect and choose simpler activities.
Mad respect.
I’ve had stormy weather set mine off at least a dozen times. Each time I’ve had a feeling of attaboy towards it.
I am usually using a laptop, so I don’t really need UPS
I have a ups mostly so my wireless will stay active for as long as the laptops in a power outage.