My little UPS

Recently, my mother had an incident, where it appears the electric supply departed from its nominal 230V, 50Hz AC, and provided some other voltage, which destroyed a number of electrical appliances.

A surge protector won't help against this kind of fault. Surge protectors are designed to protect against high-voltage spikes with a relatively small energy content.

Unsurprisingly, the electric company's line is "Yes, our equipment failed, and broke your appliances. Hard luck. Claim on your own insurance, we're not paying for it." Unpheasant pluckers.

On another point, the occasionaly crashes which I get from my computer, and have pretty much come to accept (it doesn't happen too often), I have wondered for a while whether they might be down to variations/spikes in the power supply lines from switch-on transient from nearby heavy loads, and stuff.

So I figured it was maybe time to give a little UPS a go. I decided that my minimum specification should include Buck & Boost (also known as AVR or AVC or line correction), which can compensate for (relatively) minor variations in the supply without having to switch over to battery.

Belkin Gold series UPSs look pretty good, but I couldn't find one cheaper than 60 squids.

I found that Scan have some Liebert Powersure ProActive UPSs, with the 325VA version at just 35 squids. It is worth noting that the manufacturers website indicates that this model has been discontinued.

Well, so far so good. Its plugged in, seems to work superficially. I was happy to get a serial lead, and two IEC pass-through leads for powering equipment which I hadn't been expecting.

I prolly write more about it as I fiddle with it some more. Give me a prod if there's anything you'd particularly like to know about it.

Addendum 11/06/2003

Well, I've been using the ups for a while, and I haven't had any of those random crashes yet. I had wondered whether a 350VA ups would be sufficient, but its doing fine so far. It's powering my main pc (but not the monitors), which is a P4 1.9GHz, on an Asus P4BE (if I've remembered correctly). Its got 2 sticks of 512MB PC133 SDRAM in, a GeForce 2 GTS, 2 mirage Z128Pro graphics cards, 100baseTX ethernet adaptor (can't remmebr which, probably one of the cheapo Realtek things), probably most importantly: four Western Dig. 80GB 7200 rpm hard drives, a dvd reader, and a CDRW drive. It hasn't given me any warnings about loading the UPS too much yet.

When I get a spare minute, I'm going to load up the usb ports with webcams (they're about the most curent-hungry usb devices I can think of), watch a dvd, burn a CD, and access all of the hard drives at once, and see if it grumbles then. I suspect it'll be ok, 'cos it doesn't complain when I power-up the pc, and starting 4 hard drives all at once is probably about as bad as it gets.