What UPS to buy?

[Meiyer]

I want to buy a UPS Box (it's for powercuts - so that I can shut my PC down and save my work during a powercut, there's been 10+ powercuts in my area this year and I lost a lot of my work).

 

What should I pay attention to? I don't want to screw my computer up. 

My PC consumes approx 400 Watts in total.

 

Thanks. 

[Dedayog]

I looked into this as well , a couple years ago.  I pull a little over 400w so I was recommended a 1500av UPS for a 10 minute load like this one.

 

https://www.microcenter.com/product/353897/cyberpower-systems-pfc-series-1500va-ups-with-lcd,-avr,-10-outlets,-usb-serial-ports,-usb-charging-ports,-and-rj45-coax-protection

 

I don't know how good these calculators are, but APC has one on their site....

 

https://www.apc.com/shop/us/en/tools/ups_selector/home/load

[josephabbott07]

The APC BX1400UI UPS is a viable option (click here for UK website) paired with these cables for each of your monitors. I'm not very good at researching voltages, so make sure you don't fry your US equiptment with UK equiptment

[josephabbott07]

Just now, Dedayog said:

I looked into this as well , a couple years ago.  I pull a little over 400w so I was recommended a 1500av UPS for a 10 minute load like this one.

 

https://www.microcenter.com/product/353897/cyberpower-systems-pfc-series-1500va-ups-with-lcd,-avr,-10-outlets,-usb-serial-ports,-usb-charging-ports,-and-rj45-coax-protection

 

I don't know how good these calculators are, but APC has one on their site....

 

https://www.apc.com/shop/us/en/tools/ups_selector/home/load

sorry didn't see you posted

[Meiyer]

Thx for the replies.

[divito]

There are a lot of options and terms which can make things confusing. To simplify, you want to make sure it:

1. Has enough outlets to plug in all the devices you want to have power.

2. Has ~25% more wattage than you need for all devices (monitor and anything else you might want), to account for increased load and longer runtime.

3. Then find what length of runtime is acceptable to you.

Most people that deploy these, or even small businesses, simply need something to help it run for maybe 5 minutes to ensure they can save and close most applications. If you need additional time for copying, exporting, or other such tasks, you'll obviously need something that will support your load for longer. All models will typically say they handle x% load for y amount of minutes. If your load is closer to 100%, that time will be obviously a lot shorter.

In that case, something like this specifies "Supports 50% load (250W) up to 10 minutes and full load (500W) up to 3 minutes". So if you happened to purchase something similar, and all your devices have a consistent load of around 500W, you're only going to have approx. 3 minutes to deal with what you need to, provided you're present at the computer at that time.