Our power service is horrible (example, another). There is just no way around it. We seem to get regular under-voltage events and the occasional power cycle on a regular basis. Every once in a while for fun we get thrown a multi-hour outage as well. What a blast! For a computer geek like myself, this is nerve racking. I had some new UPS units on my Amazon wish list for a long time but it seems nobody thinks that is a fun present.

I hadn’t “right-sized” my UPS for my server for years. During that time I went from a simple tower with a couple of drives to my terabyte server with 10 platters spinning at all times. The Back-UPS Pro 650 I had on it was completely inadequate and to make it even better a couple months ago the battery had given up the ghost so there was NO battery power at all. I issued a self-test one day on accident which resulted in an immediate reboot!

I upgraded my server setup to a Smart-UPS 1500VA RM model. I chose the rack-mount model because I plan in the coming weeks to buy a half-rack for my server gear in the laundry room to get it all organized and setup nice. Great UPS. Got a little nervous first time I plugged it in. This thing has much more robust circuitry than any other UPS I have so it makes a lot of “electrical noises”.

I also solved the problem for my home theatre PC and the two TiVos. Now we will not miss our favorite satellite content even if the power is down for a bit! 🙂 I got a Back-UPS RS 1000VA for this stuff. My only disappointment here is that it seems that the Back-UPS RS line only works with PowerChute Personal Edition so I cannot tie it into the main PowerChute Console and manage everything from one place. Maybe they will change that in a future release of the software.

I got a new battery for my old Back-UPS Pro 650VA and that is now running my office and moved the absolutely lame Back-UPS 350VA that I had here to my iMac G5. Every computer is now on its own UPS. Yeah!