A question for the ages (geekery)
On that note, any good recommendations for cheap UPSes?
I'm not bitter about this one failing, really. It cost $30 and it lasted around 5 years (maybe even longer). It's definitely not just needing a new battery, though — when I got home my condo was full of the smell of burning solder, and its "OMG wiring fault" alarm was going off. Even with the battery removed it wouldn't power up (aside from the wiring fault alarm) so the thing is clearly toast.
I might just go back to a regular power strip anyway, though. It was great back in New York when I had brownouts and power dips all the time, but I've never heard it even trip since then. Frankly, the only thing plugged into it that could actually benefit from continuous power is the TiVo, and having it record nothing all day was probably "worse" (i.e. better) than it losing whatever show it was in the middle of (if any) at 9:30 AM. In the rare case that I have a prolonged power outage, having an extra 15 minutes of Internet connectivity isn't going to make much of a difference, and in a situation where I can't even get online via my phone I doubt that I'd be able to get online via cable either.
Mostly I'm really glad this thing failed relatively safely rather than burning the building down. That would have rather sucked.
Comments
I haven't used a UPS since 2004, when I lived in Raleigh and the power went out if it was breezy or raining or calm or not raining or there was a full moon or it was Thursday. I never saw the power dip at all in NYC or (so far) in SF, and I only had one brief outage in Quebec.
Unless I have a reason, I intend to stay UPS-free, if only to avoid all the fun things that can go wrong with a large lead-acid battery sitting a few feet from me and/or unattended for 8 hours at a time.
I got in the UPS habit back in Las Cruces where there were power dips constantly, and I needed one in NYC, and I guess even in Seattle I'd always hear the dang thing cycle occasionally, but in SF my power's been rock solid, aside from a couple of outages which a UPS wouldn't have saved me from anyway.
Also, all my work-in-progress (at home) is on a laptop, which is of course already backed up. (My G5 also used to be my main work-in-progress machine.)
Now, what's silly is how much work I've lost at work ever since switching to a desktop and not having a UPS. I swear, SoMa must be on another planet as far as PG&E is concerned.