need...more...power

[cellio]

When I came home from work on erev Sukkot I was greeted by the plaintive wail of a UPS that had lost its will to live (thank you thank you thank you for not doing that 12 hours later!). There was nothing to be done then but unplug things. After Shabbat I replaced it; while I briefly considered just ordering a new battery, I noted that I was using all outlets on the UPS and all the wall outlets and was still resorting to a power squid, and on a recent power outage the UPS hadn't really held up very long. I was asking it to do too much; time for a bigger one. (And anyway, I didn't want my equipment to be unprotected for the several more days it would take for a new battery to arrive.)

This is as orderly as these things get:

Comments

Re: ...compulsion...too...strong...resistance...is...useless....

[cellio]

I am using the provided outlets, with no overloading, for the types of equipment for which UPSs are sold. If that's a fire hazard waiting to happen, then are UPSs with more than some magic number of outlets inherently unsafe in household settings?

(Three of the ten have battery backup; the rest are just surge-protected.)

Several of those plugs are for devices that are usually off or sleeping -- printer, scanner, one external hard drive, legacy PC. I hope the network hub, USB hub, and speakers are drawing fairly small amounts of power. That leaves a Mac Mini, an LCD monitor, and one external hard drive (Time Machine) that are usually more active.

All that said, I always put my UPS on a milk crate (or some such) instead of on the floor, partly for better air circulation and partly to keep it out of range of easy cat outputs.

Re: ...compulsion...too...strong...resistance...is...useless....

[dragonazure.livejournal.com]

It just looks scary in the picture. If things are mostly on standby, its probably OK. I was considering all the fire safety lectures we get every holiday season about overloading the circuits with too many lights--but I think that was from the days when light strings were made of incandescent bulbs....

Offhand, I can't quote you what is considered "safe". It has to do with the current your household wiring is rated for, and that is going to be based on the age of your house and the electrical codes (if any) that were in place when it was built or last renovated.

Getting the UPS up off the floor is a great idea.