What is your computer most often plugged into?
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UPS (Score:4, Insightful)
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Agree. It saves hardware and the hassle of troubleshooting problems caused by poor power conditioning. I have UPSs on my computer and gateway/cable box. During a power outage (seldom, I admit), I can still access the internet :)
[John]
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I was talking to my son earlier about power conditioning... he's got a very beefy machine (quad core, uber graphics, two hard drives...) and he wanted to drop from the 1100W PSU he has (which doesn't get warm enough to spin its own internal fan) to a 450W which he'd helpfully calculated as being the *barest minimum* he could get away with.
So I asked him how long he'd had his computer for. Three years. OK. When was the last time he had any power issues on it?
Whassat? Never? You're welcome. That's down to the
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I used to be able to do that, but more recently I've noticed that when the power goes out the DSL will go out either the same time or shortly thereafter.
One thing I have noticed is that cheap modems and routers tend to have way less problems when plugged into a good UPS.
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Back on June 30, a severe storm knocked out power to my neighborhood for about 20 hours. I had my systems on a 1500VA APC Smart-UPS, and after a couple of minutes, when it was obvious the power wasn't coming on soon, I turned off the big machines and stayed online with an Atom box.
Unfortunately, it appears that Comcast hadn't planned for long power outages. Twenty minutes after the power went out, the internet went down and stayed down. That kind of performance doesn't give me much confidence in their home
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Really, a $150 investment to protect your $500+ computer is more than worth it.
Don't forget to add the cost of replacing the UPS battery every year or two. Plus the time to setup and regularly test the fail-over and auto-shutdown.
FWIW I generally use a UPS on the servers and firewalls, but not on any of the clients.
Re:UPS (Score:4, Informative)
Every UPS I've used, from cheap home ones, to full rack APC units, I've found that the batteries last about 4-5 years. The home unit needed $40 for new batteries (same OEM, not APC-branded.) They lasted 8 years, which I thought was pretty good. (And, yes, I do test it every year or sooner.) It's pretty cheap insurance and you can use the power in an emergency for things like inflating an air mattress if you have to sleep in the basement due to tornado warnings (yes, I've don that!)
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I agree, I have one that is starting to complain about the battery and its somewhere tween 4 and 5 years, who cares a replacement UPS in the same size cost less than 100 bucks, its about equal to the cost of the battery
frankly with UPS's being fairly cheap until you get into the big boys, its probably better to replace the whole darn thing anyway as 4-5 years of getting nailed by the environment probably has weakened its protection hardware anyway
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I have four APC UPSs - Smart-UPS v/s 650, Smart-UPS 700, 2200, 3000. These are older models, 10-15 years old. They work fine, but all have one design problem - poor cooling.
Smart-UPS v/s 650 has no ventilation holes and get very hot inside, I use CSB HRL series batteries (longer life and higher discharge efficiency) and even they fail quickly. I solved the problem by drilling ventilation holes in the case and attaching a fan to one side of the UPS.
Smart-UPS 700 has ventilation holes but no fan. Attaching a
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Do UPSes change much over those years? I had old ones with lights, and the newer were better since they can show digital readings unlike my old beige ones. I wonder what in a few years will have better.
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Have you checked the maximum output of that $150 UPS in W?
I don't know what the power consumption of your PC is like, but a quick bit of research found that the cheapest UPS I could buy that can cope with my PC (700W or so under load) is around £400, that's about $627.
Obviously that PC cost more than $500, but given that power disruptions in my area occur maybe once in a decade or so, I'll stick with a simple surge protector.
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Are you running quad SLI? No? Then your computer isn't using 700W of power. Typical gaming rigs these days rarely break 200W, even though they may be sold with 1000W (or more) PSUs.
Even with four GTX 980s in quad SLI, they would only be drawing 4*165W (= 660W) at peak. Even with a $1000 CPU (~130W TDP) and a dozen drives you're still going to be extremely hard pressed to get anywhere close to 700W.
Also, here's a 865W UPS for $180 [newegg.com], that's pretty typical pricing and hugely oversized for a single machine.
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Just two 980's in SLI, but your figures only take into account the power consumed at their rated TDP - overclock them and add in an overclocked CPU too and 700W isn't out of reach by any means, when you add in all the drives, fans etc.. and the monitor of course.
That is pretty cheap though - got anything like as cheap in the UK?
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The numbers I provided are actually generously overstated, as you'll only hit them when you're 100% loading everything.
When you're doing something useful (like playing a game), you don't have all 4+ CPU cores loaded 100%, nor do you have all 2+ GPUs 100% loaded, so their actual power usage is significantly lower than their max TDP. It is extremely difficult to put 100% load on a highly parallel resource like a multi-core CPU or (multiple) modern GPUs, and to do both at the same time (while doing anything us
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Depends on the power supply - some Corsair models, for example, can deliver more power than rated and stay intact for some time (just that the efficiency falls below what is needed for the 80+ silver or whatever certification).
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Who said anything about a 700W power supply? The PSU is 1050W. 700W (well, 684W peak to be exact) is what I measured at the wall.
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Yeah, but that guy works at Best Buy and is smarter about computers than you.
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I honestly don't know how much it applies to desktops, but certainly in other form factors, you can't rely on TDP as an indicator of the size of power supply needed. TDP tells you how much heat the heatsink needs to be able to dissipate. If you exceed the TDP for a few seconds, there's enough thermal mass that you won't exceed the maximum junction temperature of the chip, as long as you keep your average power (on the scale of seconds or minutes) below the TDP. Indeed, many devices like laptops, tablets, an
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wait, what?
Those KW PSUs won't be delivering 1KW either. If they are, then you've got issues beyond how hot they're getting. People buy KW PSUs because at low draws (typically 300-600W, where the fuck do you get 200W total from, I can piss that just on a processor and mainboard, never mind HDD GPU and the keyboard and mouse) they're making no noise and kicking out very little heat.
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Power supplies are inefficient at low load. If you care about them kicking out heat, you should buy them as small as you can get away with.
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ok, lowballing everything, his box runs 120W CPU, 90W mainboard, 25W hard drives, 200W GPU, 10W of fans. That's a total draw at lowballed max load of 445W. That's right on the lip of the efficiency curve for the particular PSU he's got in (generally runs about half the rated load for ~85%, but really depends on build quality). If he was running a mobile PII off of it, I'd be slightly concerned about efficiency, but really I'm not.
For comparison, one of my servers had a 500W PSU which ran 20 hard drives plus
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I have one of those, the little box says 383W with WoW running with all the pretties on at 1080p (not including the screen). My laptop has a softmonitor that says total system draw with World of Tanks running at 768p and all the pretties (albeit at 3fps) is 54W and the PSU slowly cooking itself.
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700W is excessive, but 200W is also a low estimate. A high end GPU can pull around 180W these days (they are actually two GPUs on one card, with shared memory). A high end CPU will have a TDP of 120W, let along what it needs for computation. 350W is more realistic for a gaming rig.
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That's right, rather than keep my computer running through power outages, it was shutting my computer off during stable power.
It has a build in surge protector, so now it's just plugged into that side.
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I've had battery failures before as well, but they've never shut the power off. Only ones I've seen that will do that are true UPSs instead of the *much* more popular standby UPSs, which is part of the reason I bought standby units to begin with. There aren't too many anymore that can't switch to battery power fast enough to keep a PC up, and if you're using a true UPS that doe
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I've never had the battery on a UPS last longer than 2 years. Have you checked out what those batteries cost to replace? About $25 less than the cost of a new UPS. Considering that I usually keep a computer for 10 years, I'd have spent nearly 3 times as much on UPS batteries since I bought this beast than I spent on the computer and it's ancillary equipment.
I can live with having to restart after a five minute power outage at that price, thank you very much. :(
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UPS: $100 [amazon.com]
Battery: $35 [amazon.com]
That's more like $65 less, or 35% of the cost. The battery costs about 1/3 as much as the UPS. So your UPS cost $38 and your batteries cost $12?
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I haven't bought a UPS in ten years because they weren't worth it. And you know what? I've lost ZERO data in the intervening ten years. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch.
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bollocks. I have a UPS I've actually upgraded from 400WH (as supplied) to 1200WH simply by tripling the capacity of the STANDARD SEALED LEAD ACID BATTERY BANK. A 6V 4.2AH battery runs about £6. Run them in paired series through an inverter, which costs £40 (and comes with a pair of 6's or a single 12). You can even charge the batteries very easily by running a line from a PV panel to each battery/pair through a rectifier (which I've done). Hell, given an efficient enough computer system (netbook
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my laptop has a battery already so surge protector/wall socket is a real possibility. also laptop batteries tend to last longer than UPS batteries.
Re:UPS - don't need one (Score:3)
Much simpler than trying to manage a UPS.
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Microsoft Surface?
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Every laptop has one built in.
$150 ? (Score:2)
You should be able to get one cheaper than $150
I paid less than $90 for the one I have, and its 1400VA
from Tigerdirect when it was on special
Re:UPS (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd add that the UPSs I have purchased in the past have failed more often than the computers I had plugged into them. No more UPSs for me, thanks.
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how many times have your UPS failures resulted in permanent loss of archival data?
Thank the maker you've only had to fork out for new UPS bricks instead of entire computer systems when your latest greatest photo albums have gone the way of the ozone layer because you've not considered that the UPS going bang is infinitely better than your PC going bang..
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You're doing it wrong.
Even if some kind of power event takes out both of your mirrored disks you still have your offsite backup, right?
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One could always go the old school route and move the backup offsite yourself. e.g. an external drive in a safe deposit box.
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you've not considered that the UPS going bang is infinitely better than your PC going bang..
The trouble is that, even with a UPS, my PC can decide to go bang of its own accord - so I need to solve that problem too :-/
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I lived for years on the edge of neighborhood that had unreliable power; it wasn't unusual to have very brief power outages - on the order of seconds, multiple times per day,especially in summer when the heat wave hits and folks crank up the air conditioning and my desktop computers would restart.
That's no big deal for laptops - but those cost a lot more than even a more powerful desktop. And at the time, they were a lot more than a desktop & UPS combined.
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So, your computers never failed without UPSes connected? Which UPSes did you use?
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I've had the opposite experience. I just get basic APC UPSs and I've never had one cause me a moment's trouble. I can't say I WOULD have lost data if I HADN'T had them, but it HAS saved me the bother of having all my machines unexpectedly do a hard shutoff when the power dips for a second. You just have to test on occasion and replace batteries as needed because they WILL fail silently -- if the battery is dead, you won't know until the power goes out and your machine goes down.
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that's the point! The UPS should be failing more often than the computers as it is taking the spikes and brown outs instead of your computer hardware.
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I'd add that the UPSs I have purchased in the past have failed more often than the computers I had plugged into them. No more UPSs for me, thanks.
I have two APC UPS devices. One for my desktop and one for my other accessories (cable router, switch, Vonage router, and phones). My area has short power outages every so often when they are working on lines, etc. Plus, using Vonage, I need to power my internet devices for phone service during power outages. I also have my cell phone and could use it as an emergency battery for charging as well.
I've had both for about 4 years now with no problems or issues. I have had to replace UPSs (or the batteries
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I have had a dedicated UPS for about 14 years for my main PC. Since I have had less hardware failures (mainly power supplies).
It also helps protect the data to some extent. $150 to protect my ~$1000 PC plus some data protection.
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What definitely helps is that hardware from around 2010 is a lot more reliable than hardware built before the year 2000. That alone may help to explain less hardware failures.
Getting better quality components (good chance you did that the same time you decided on a UPS), or simply luck also helps a lot.
I've barely had hardware failures over the past 20 years - and even if UPS would have prevented them all, it'd have cost me a lot more (need for multiple UPS units due to different locations) than to just rep
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Why replace it? I occasionally change the SLA battery when the self-test shows it's become unreliable. It's a common 12V 7aH unit and a good quality replacement is far cheaper than an entire new UPS.
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For a $500 computer, it would be a $40 UPS. That said what is your data worth? What is your time (involved in setting up the PC and installing apps)?
Also, a UPS isn't just about protecting against the damaging severe spikes and surges or outages - I used to live in an apartment and had all sorts of mysterious reboots and lockups until I attached through a cheap UPS. I took the same experience to heart with my job at the time, as an embedded systems engineer - we had a troublesome installation that had the p
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it's insurance against losing hours of work rather than electronics
Which is why I roll my eyes at the people proclaiming their UPS goes on their cable modem and firewall, not their computer.
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it's insurance against losing hours of work rather than electronics
Which is why I roll my eyes at the people proclaiming their UPS goes on their cable modem and firewall, not their computer.
I'd do that, since my current computer is a laptop with its own battery, but that's just me.
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I have mine on both the computers and the DSL modem and router and some other hardware (not printers!), mostly because I run a PBX and VoIP phones, and don't want to lose a call in progress.
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Which is why I roll my eyes at the people proclaiming their UPS goes on their cable modem and firewall, not their computer.
Some of us have a UPS for our cable (well, FTTC actually) modem and firewall, and another for the computer. I prefer things to just keep working.
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Definitely not a theoretical risk... as being in computer related work for the last 20 years I've seen a dozen machines fail due to power issues (lightning strikes mainly). I had a customer *using* a ups who had his motherboard, drive and mostly everything fry (the cdrom still worked) after a lightning hit. Despite having backups, he needed to recover the last day's work which forced him to send his drive out for full recovery for several thousand dollars.
I had a customer with an office of 20+ machines ha
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I used to do tech support for a computer manufacture... there was a storm and the power went out now my pc doesn't power on or won't boot was a fairly common call.
I went to a website I shouldn't have and it changed the home page, what do I do? My parents will be home soon and my Dad will ground me until I'm in college, was also fairly common call. I always want to reply with "I'm sorry, you probably won't get into college... unless it's a community college or you get sports scholarship."
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Actually, my company has been seeing a particular airport having a lot of power outages that has seen at one field workstation be lost per outage (not hardware dead, but the PC has to be re-imaged). Considering how long the UPSs I have will last (and I got the UPS for my PC for like $80 and my network equipment for like $90), its worth it considering the thousands of dollars they are protecting and the headaches they are saving. Data loss is my bigger concern, especially since I am in an area prone to bro
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tell that to the sysadmins who maintain server farms, and ask them how much rack space is dedicated to power loss mitigation.
(disclosure: I've built such systems. Fully 25% of EVERY rack is power redundancy, and in a large data centre every tenth rack is nothing but batteries).
Re: UPS (Score:2)
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both. Rack hardware isn't cheap. Batteries are.
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Nope nope.
Not how it works, unlikely to happen anyway but don't spread your BS around that a 1000V or more surge would only take out the power supply.
Yes it is, with modern PSU. I have seen old systems that fried everything when they failed (1990), but one of the roles of modern power supplies is surge protection. Besides these days they can take anywhere from 100W to 300W as part of their standard operation because they make them identical for all markets, and if you have over a 1000W surge, you are having a lightning strike, no electronic on the path of the lightning will survive a strike, the only way to avoid that is lightning rods that takes the pat
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I would be interested to read some real stats on the percentage of people who have bought a UPS and actually needed it for important things.
If you ask me, they're mostly a giant waste of batteries.
Solar powered install count? (Score:2)
I have one computer connected to a PSW inverter feeding from two six volt golf cart batteries. The power to the batteries comes from a decent charge controller and few PV panels. This setup doesn't give much juice, but it is enough to keep a laptop and other accessories charged no matter what happens to the mains power.
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yeah that's hot fusion (the sun) minus the incredible heat. So, cold fusion. Ooh, look, last option. :)
Computer is plugged into... (Score:2)
...a power strip, which is plugged into a multiway adapter, which is plugged into a combined power strip / surge protector, which is plugged into the wall socket.
Hmmm....it seems quite warm in here.
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And then it gets too hot and bright to handle. :)
Depends on what I'm plugging in (Score:2)
Basic plug strip for the cord that comes out of my computer. I don't have a cord coming out of my armpit... :-)
...laura
Where's the ZPM option? (Score:2)
Where's the ZPM [wikia.com] option, you insensitive clods?
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it's in there with the naquadah gener... oh, nevermind.
Missing option in the list: Me! (Score:2)
How could you all be so insensitive and closed minded? Very disappointed, I thought slashdot was a progressive site with knowledge of most of the technology available today?
- Richard McCockmash
Marketing director, manufacturer FuFme inc (c) 1999
Laptops don't need that stuff (Score:2)
Both UPS and Surge (Score:2)
Monitor, modem, and router plugged into a UPS
Actual computer (which is a laptop) plugged into a surge protector.
I picked cold fusion reactor (Score:2)
...as the closest I could actually get to "solar-sourced photovoltaics and chemical storage".
Power does not fail here (Score:2)
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UPS & Power Conditioner (Score:2)
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I don't always plug my computer in (Score:2)
Lots of reasons (Score:2)
One story I like to tell: I had a client who kept all their important records on the computer. They had it plugged into a wall socket.
Occasionally, it would 'act funny' or even shut down. I knew there was a good chance they would lose data. (I also set them up with an external drive and a back-up program)
I put on a new, sine-wave UPS.
I started getting calls that 'the new battery is making noises periodically all day'. I went out there and, sure enough, the UPS would switch to battery for several seconds man
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I've never had voltage sag to the point that the battery was needed, but there have been a few times, during summer heat waves, when my UPS would go into boost mode (about 108V or so at the wall socket). Lately, though, I've been getting higher-than-normal voltage, consistently 124-127V, and when it gets above 126 the UPS will knock 16V off. At least it can use an autotransformer to deal with minor over- and under-voltage conditions, instead of killing the battery. If it were switching to battery I'd be cal
UPS user here... (Score:2)
UPS - mostly for brown-outs (Score:2)
Side-effect of a UPS is that it smooths all these things out... oh, and surge protection too.
UPS *and* generator. (Score:2)
The (very small) UPS is there, really, to help me over the 20-second lag it takes the generator to kick in. God bless the wife's annual bonus -- a generator when you're in rural(ish) NH is a really good thing come winter storms.
Surge protectors may not protect (Score:2)
All my kit used to be connected to surge protectors, but having had the main trip switch go a number of times I got a professional electrician in. He commented that surge protectors and RCD units (not old fashioned fuse-wire) in the main distributor box can interact to cause slight earth leakage, leading to the trip. Sure enough, changing the surge protectors back to standard 4/6/8-ways stopped the frequent failures.
In addition, and this is UK specific and may not apply in the US, the way the national grid
Missed one (Score:2)
Some of us get our power from giant french perpetual motion machines that we built from specs on the internet in our back yards. Not like I would expect you to understand. It seems I am clearly without an intellectual equal on this site.
I bet half the answers are wrong (Score:2)
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Considering the reliability of the power here no need for UPS. About 5 power outages the last 15 years. None of them major.
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The 'off the grid' answer is 'generator'.
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My computer has a built in batter backup (it's a laptop). As long as my strip protects from the spikes, the actual outage is inconvenient more than anything else.
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I do get my electricity from a nuke plant, and the 345KV cord is over a hundred miles long
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when the charging retard is done with your laptop, send him over here, I forgot my brick
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I have my UPS plugged into another UPS just in case. I DONT want my UPS going down even if my UPS goes down. It's been working great keeping my Raspberry Pi online.
Yo, dawg...
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not the only, ... (Score:2)
The USofA is not the only country with abysmal mains, but I haven't lived or visited anywhere within it that noise, brownouts, skipped cycles, and total failure (I am actually in a "power outage group" for deliberate power-company shutoffs) aren't common enough to make a UPS necessary.
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Are surge protectors a 110 V USA thing? Can't say many Europeans I've met have ever had one, except the super-cautious.
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I think there's probably less of a problem with voltage drop in electric power circuits built to European standards (and even more so with the massively over-specified UK standards) as the higher voltages mean there's less current in the wire and so less of an impact due to the resistance of the wire itself. That eliminates a lot of the local problems (e.g., due to having kitchen appliances) or reduces them to the level where the switch-mode power supply can usually compensate easily.
I don't know whether th