Yay, Power Protection. Yay, UPS Battery Backup. Yay, APC.

😀

I DO love my APC J15BLK Battery Backup UPS, which also offers surge protection, 4 independent banks of EMI/RFI filtering, and voltage regulation in addition to the Battery. But the battery backup is the main thing.

The J15 has a pretty beefy batter in it! Whenever the power goes out, if I turn off all of my other gear, I can keep my cable DVR running for a good 1.5-2 hours. So far, that’s always been enough to get me through my local power outages.

I LOVE not losing my recordings in progress! There’s nothing more annoying than looking forward to a show, only to find that it didn’t record 🙁 With battery backup, I haven’t had to put up with that disappointment 🙂

If I were forced at gunpoint to choose, I would have to pick my J15 over my twin Synology NAS. 😮

I know, right? Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE my NAS (and I just have them setup in Basic, not RAID, for maximum storage space. Liz was right 😉 Although I probably should have some sort of redundant storage. I just figure if worst comes to worst, I can replace a failed hard drive and rip all the movies that were on that drive again :p A pain to be sure, but doable.) But my NAS storage is still a luxury. I consider the J15 absolutely vital!

Whelp, my new HTPC is on “hold” for a couple of days. I was getting oddly high CPU temp readings and some hiccups in video playback. Checked things really closely and discovered that the stock Intel low profile CPU heatsink/fan for my Core i3-2100T had a crack in its cheap, plastic frame!

That’d do it :p

So I’ve got a new, low profile heatsink/fan from Silverstone ordered. Local warehouse, so it should be hear in a few days. Sucks to have to wait, but at least I caught the problem early and avoided any further damage!

What a cheap stock unit though. Man. Just a thin plastic frame trying to hold down a tight connection. I’m already no fan of the plastic “clip” connectors used on so many Socket LGA1155/1156 heatsink/fan units. But to have those “clips” connected to nothing but a thin, plastic frame to hold the whole assembly? Just cheapo crap! I’ll be sure to replace any stock Intel coolers right off the bat from not on! 😉

bah…*now on. Not “not on”.

:p

(The “edit” button…she does not exist. lol)

Heh – sounds as though Bob 2 isn’t going to make his “Late August” release date :p

I’m pretty sure that’s how I got first crack as Beta Reader 1. I annoy Tom, I miss commas and I write comments and replies that are as long as the book itself, but I get my drafts turned in within a week! The people who actually do good Beta Reader work take longer – lol 😀

Re: Battery Technology in UPS’

As far as I know, no consumer grade UPS uses any batteries other than Sealed Lead Acid (SLA). At least all of APC’s home theatre line uses SLA batteries.
http://www.apc.com/products/apcav/products/index.cfm?action=model&id=310

SLA’s have terrible energy density, but are dirt cheap, and since personal UPS’ are not meant to be portable, there’s no reason to use any of the more expensive battery technologies that Tom discussed.

Another UPS brand I’ve had good experiences with lately is Cyberpower.

One reason that some UPS’/Power Conditioners don’t work well with some consumer equipment is that they reconstruct the AC waveform on their output to do their thing… and the cheaper ones don’t do a very good job of approximating a true sine wave. Some switching power supplies have a hard time dealing with these approximated sine waves.

It’s only been recently (<3 years) that pure sine wave UPS' have gotten reasonable affordable to the average consumer.