Affordable power back up (UPS)

The picture I have above is the CyberPower Intelligent LCD CP1500AVRLCD uninterruptible power supply (UPS) available on amazon for 140.00 dollars.  I believe having a power backup is very important for your expensive electronics.  I strongly urge anyone with a decent desktop system and monitor to purchase one.   Laptops have their own built in battery backup but I am sure they can benefit from some of the additional protection offered by having a UPS.  On fairly powerful systems the UPS isn’t going to last but a few minutes but it does come with software that will tell your computer to shut down once the battery starts getting low.  Having a UPS also helps prevent data corruption issues and other issues associated with sudden power loss.  I can’t honestly recall a case as a computer repair tech where a power supply (other than the really cheap ones) died while hooked up to a UPS.

One thing I like about this particular model unit is the information given on the LCD.  The most useful features are the display showing how long it will run if you lose power at the current power usage and the other is a kilawatt display showing your current power usage.  At this exact moment I am using 203 watts (0.203 Kw) if I bring up a usage calculator such as http://www.electricity-usage.com I can see that running this computer 24/7 costs me about 15 dollars per month.  Now I do realize there are cheap devices that will measure wattage usage such as the KILL-A-WATT device but I had a bad experience with one of those hooked up to a window AC once and have decided against hooking it up to my computer components.

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