Tuesday, July 21, 2009

UPS to the rescue – again!

I don’t know about the rest of the town or Spain in general but power cuts are fairly common here at Vilas Andrea. Some last barely a second, others go on for several minutes. Either way they are very disruptive.

Most items of electrical equipment will survive a power cut without a problem – they go off and then come back on when the power resumes. 

Sky boxes and computers definitely do not fall into that category. We don’t have a Sky box but I understand that they need to be reset following a power cut. That must be a pain in the butt. Computers will generally restart following a power cut but it all depends on what was happening when the power was lost. If you were working on something at the time, then it will be lost. There is also the possibility that programs or even the operating system will be corrupted by a power failure. 

It wasn’t a cheap solution to the problem but the UPS (uninterruptible power supply) I bought from APC has proved to be a godsend in such situations.

Take this morning; the power went off but my computer and monitor stayed on. I could have carried on working and let the UPS do its thing. When the battery became low, the software would have closed down the programs and switched the computer off automatically. Instead I chose to switch off myself since, although my router was still on,  the Internet connection was dead anyway.

Call it overkill but I’m glad I spent a couple of  hundred Euros or so on an UPS rather than face the problem of a dead computer following a power cut.

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