My BX750MI-GR has saved my precious data on two occasions. Earlier this year, my seven year old, well used waffle iron shorted, popping loudly and sparking quite brightly in the process, probably because of all the gunk that had accumulated inside its less cleanable interior over the years. That not only made my breaker trip, but also blew the 16 amp main fuse. The UPS kicked in immediately, making a klick and a beep, which felt amazing. That was my first time ever.
As for the second time, see this post.
Thanks for the reminder to order new batteries for one of mine and one of my parents UPS’s.
My old one died so I upgraded to one that actually has enough capacity for my whole setup. The machine I previously didn’t have capacity for and so was left on wall power hasn’t been damaged by any power outages or electrical mishaps as far as I know, but it will at least be nice to not have to worry about unexpected shutdowns whenever an outage happens.
We loaded some heavy equipment batteries into the basement under our tech shop.
Then we ghetto-linked them in parallel and had two APCs feeding them and feeding off them. Electricians would stare at the diagram for 20 minutes before deciding it wasn’t gonna catch everything on fire.
We lost power due to a backhoe failure up the road. We ran an entire office and a rack of gear for 8 hours.
I have a CyberPower 1500VA AVR UPS.
Some time ago, I had an electrical fault on one of two devices - either my Logitech Z906 subwoofer or a cheap power supply for a cheap monitor. Both failed at the same time and were connected to the UPS.
There’s a known issue with the Logitech Z906 where a pair of underrated resistors can blow. They had both exploded, and had also taken out a step down regulator elsewhere on the board.
So, the UPS seems to have failed to protect from an electrical fault of another connected device.
Hard to say how many times it has saved me from power surges and the like, I have everything expensive behind a UPS or surge protection so I don’t have equipment failures to compare against.
For the most part, UPS have allowed me to stay online after a power outage to tell my friends the power went out.
There were a few circumstances where my partner tripped a breaker and I was able to restore power without getting disconnected from a game.
I had electric outage for 4 hours, nobody in my userbase saw the difference, but I never managed to make my debian detect the outage so I can get a mail about the fact that there is an outage (I’m not always home).
Btw if anyone here knows how detect them outages with ups plugged in with usb on my server it would be amazing !
It has allowed me to finish multiple counter-strike matches when the power cuts out
Ok a little out if left field here, but one time after our first child was just born and we had a power outage we used the UPS to power my wife’s breast pump.
It’s saved my uptime probably dozens of times
Edit: is saved my hardware from damage probably zero times though
brownouts can stress electronics so they’ll eventually fail
Its a bit of a “prove a negative” kind of situation no? You can’t know if the UPS saved anything if you dont have a control.
Complete tangent, but those small UPS’s can often be easily converted into an inverter for a car. Replace the battery with a cigarette plug, and you can plug it in to your car and get 240/120AC in your car. You might need to kill the buzzer, but otherwise its a pretty easy mod.
Let’s be fair, You always have to kill the buzzer. Like, it’s the first option I look for on a UPS. And I have ripped them out of lesser ones. I know the power is out, I don’t need a buzzer/beeper. And I’ve got the thing monitored with automatic shutdowns.
They scream at you when they lose wall power. You know that they at least prevented a hard power off when that happens.
Yeah, but no guarantee that the hard power off would have caused data corruption, especially with a relatively idle server, which all of mine are most of the time :/
Dang, if I ever get trapped somewhere, I hope you’re in there with me and that you brought your swiss army knife.
Can’t bring it anywhere, UPS is too heavy :D
Yes and they save me all the time. My area is hit or miss when a storm rolls through. Sometimes the power goes out, sometimes it doesn’t.
Yep, just got one!
Yes, 0 times. It has kept the power going through brown outs and stuff, so there is that.
Also, I try to always use surge protectors at least on valuable equipment. The UPS is flair. :3
Not having a UPS is like running through a cornfield with your junk hanging out.
There’s a chance a leaf or stalk will catch you just right and give you a gnarly paper cut on your genitals.
Why risk it?
Nothing would’ve prepared me for that beautiful analogy
I’m fortunate enough to live in a region with an extremely stable powergrid.
But it makes a loud clack when switching to battery power which I witnessed once over the last three years. Presumably just some power fluctuations that exceeded a certain threshold (since power worked fine afterwards and it immediately went back to being powered by mains) but that could already be enough to shut down my server.
Either way, I like to believe it has saved my data once and the purchase was worth it.
Me with 4 HDDs spinning during a brownout:
