I’ve never really liked spending money on UPS’s… I have fairly reliable power, so it’s really not something I’ve wanted to commit the money to. Recently I got an APC Rackmount UPS for my servers off Craigslist, and it’s worked well. About a year back, I got a 1500VA ‘Cyber Power’ UPS from NewEgg for my workstation– it was less expensive than the others, and had decent reviews…
Well, just now the power went out. My servers kept running so I was able to shut them down(I really should setup some kind of notification so they shut themselves down, but I haven’t gotten around to it…). Unfortunately, my workstation blipped out immediately with the power. After the power came back, it kept complaining about ‘overload’ when my workstation started up… The LCD read-out said 123W. I know my workstation can pull ~250W at times(measured with a Kill-o-Watt watt meter), but that’s still well within the limits of a 1500VA UPS that has nothing else on it(I have monitors on a separate old APC UPS)… It appears this UPS is junk. Even though I’ve done the little “test” in their control application regularly, it still didn’t work once power actually was removed… It looks like I’ll be getting a brand name UPS from now on… APC or maybe Tripp Lite.