UPS Is Your Friend

This week's column by Ctein

I don't mean the package delivery service, although I always look forward to the appearance of the big brown boxy truck on my block. UPS stands for Uninterruptible Power Supply, and if you're at all dependent upon your computer(s) it's cheap insurance and peace of mind.

A UPS is a box about the size of a shoebox (more or less) that plugs into the wall socket and has a bunch of power outlet sockets on the back that your electronics plug into. Inside the UPS is a sealed lead acid battery, some AC/DC converters, and monitoring circuitry. If the line frequency or voltage fluctuates (or goes out entirely), the UPS switches to its internal battery within a cycle and continues to feed 120V AC to its outlet sockets.

Depending on how heavily you've loaded down the supply, the internal battery will be good for anywhere from about a half dozen minutes to half an hour or more. That's enough time for you to save any work you're in the middle of and shut down any electronics.

It'll not only save you from lost work product, but it can save you from lost equipment. Four or so years back we had a power brownout here that somehow managed to fry my Apple Cinema Display, despite there being a transformer between the display and the wall socket. Probably should've gotten a UPS back then, but I didn't. The local power's been reliable for the past 15 years, with outages a rare thing.

Two weeks ago was the exception. Four outages in three days, and I thought I was going to go nuts. It was a Murphy's-law situation. I was doing some orbital simulations for a book project (a story I may tell you at some future time but not now). It was straightforward but somewhat tedious, repetitive work. The software that does this well only runs under Windows, so I was running my Windows virtual environment on the iMac.

There's no difference between running virtual Windows and real Windows...except...if you yank the plug on virtual Windows, it leaves the virtual hard drive file in a confused state. Confused, as in unbootable and unusable. The only recovery is to go to the backup and restore the virtual drive file.

That's fine, except 1.) it takes a fair chunk of time to port over that large a file from the backup drive and 2. any work done after the last backup is gone. Doesn't matter whether it was saved or not; it got saved to a virtual drive that no longer exists.

After the first outage, it took me most of the day to figure all this out and get it straightened out and back to where I'd been.

The second time it happened, I only lost about half a day's productivity.

After that, I got completely paranoid and started archiving what I was doing every half-hour. Which was another source of wasted time and still didn't eliminate the time it took to restore from the backup.

Let me repeat: this was somewhat tedious, repetitive work I was doing. Oh yeah, how much more fun it was having to do it repeatedly!

Enough was enough. I logged into TOP's Amazon affiliate link and bought a CyberPower CP1350PFCLCD PFC Sinewave UPS 1350VA 810W PFC Comaptible Mini-Tower for $159.99. It was possibly more capacity than I needed, but more is better and it wasn't much more expensive than a lower capacity unit.

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Left: rear panel of the
CyberPower tower

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It's a nice design: made to be energy-efficient (it "sleeps" itself except when it needs to top off the battery or detects a line fluctuation) and it puts out sine wave power instead of square wave (supercheap UPS's do the latter, and that may not matter with modern transformers/switching supplies, but then again...). The front panel display is great and tells me just what I need to know about the state of my power.

With a couple of power strips plugged into the UPS, I had it supporting both the 27" iMac and the 15" MacBook Pro, the Apple Cinema Display, all eight external hard drives, the phone service/Internet router/modem, my AudioEngine computer speakers that Mike recommended, even the 60W desk lamp that happened to be plugged into one of the power strips. With everything turned on, the UPS reported that I was drawing less than half its capacity and that I had 10 minutes to shut things down in the event of a power failure.

Naturally, the next thing I did was to yank the power cord from the wall socket. The office electronics didn't blink. After I turned off the desk lamp and the two computers, the UPS's display informed me that I had well over an hour of runtime remaining before the battery would be drained.

There are two reasons why that might matter. The first is that my MacBook Pro runs fine off its batteries, so the UPS could give me more than an hour's access to its external drives. Nice, if I don't want my work interrupted quite so abruptly. The second is just a maybe—I won't know what will actually happen until I have a real power failure. Our access to the world is through a fiber-optic phone/data line; we no longer have a copper wire phone line. That means that in the case of loss of house power, the phones go down along with the inter-webs. If all it takes to keep those up and running is to keep the router/modem live, then the UPS will do the job (for a while). Dunno if that's the case, but I'm hopeful.

I'm almost looking forward to the next power outage to test all of this out for real.

Well, no, not really.

Ctein

Columnist Ctein looks out for your supply of power every week on Wednesdays.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Dave (a.k.a. Sparky) in NM: "Our power comes from a rural electric co-op, and outages are regular occurrence. For that reason, we've got four UPS devices feeding all our computer equipment. They've been invaluable. Not only have they provided us with consistent power and surge protection, but on three occasions they sacrificed themselves, saving our equipment from lightning strikes. Unfortunately, many of the other electronics in the house and office that were only connected to surge protectors were fried. I've yet yet to find a practical method of protecting network cabling from transferring lightning strikes to connected equipment. None of our strikes were direct hits, but they were close enough to find their way through in-wall CAT-5e cabling and blow out routers and gigabit switches. If you've got any suggestions aside from abandoning the wired portions of my network and switching to completely to wireless, I'd love to hear them...."

M. Stanton: "I wonder how long that UPS would run my Gralab timer and the 211 bulb in my D5XL?"

Ctein replies: Hmmm, well, I can't imagine the whole assemblage is drawing over 200 watts, and this particular model is rated at 800 watts with a 100 watt-hour battery...so even allowing for a 50% safety margin, you'd have a good 15 minutes run time. Which ought to be enough to complete a print exposure or several.

I've been working in the darkroom when the power went off. It's kinda annoying, ain't it? And, somehow, the dark gets even darker.

Will Frostmill replies to Dave (a.k.a. Sparky) in NM: "I can offer some suggestions regarding Cat-5 protection.

"In general, you want the ground each device sees at a given point to be the same. You could use a power strip that has a dumb ethernet passthrough, which grounds the Cat-5 at precisely the same point as the equipment it is connected to. This lets any surge "see" the same ground value at any given group of equipment. Lightning can do math: if the AC power line drifts high by 1500 millivolts, but the Cat-5 only rises 800, then 700 millivolts are going to subtract themselves through your computer in an effort to reach that ethernet port. (Make sure your three-prong grounded wall outlets are actually grounded. There's a cheap tester for that.) You would need to do this at every single point you connect something to a Cat-5 jack, and you would need to do this for all the other cabling as well: telephone lines and cable TV lines as well.

"Prudence dictates the same kind of common ground setup back at the router and modem. I'll make a wild guess that this would make the biggest difference.

"Take a peek at the standard grounding diagrams that now are printed at the front of nearly every home electronics user manual. You should see something similar at your home, with TV antennas, cable TV, and electrical power all having ground lines that are bonded at the same point at the Demarc, the point at which they enter your home.

"If this doesn't look right, please hire an electrician to correct it for you. DO NOT TOUCH IT. The ground stake or post MAY HAVE LIVE POWER FLOWING THROUGH IT. It's supposed to do this as a safety measure when things go wrong. Most of those things trip breakers, so no problem, but in the rare exceptional case YOU COULD DIE if you don't know how to properly check it.

There are some fantastic resources out there on the net if you start googling for terms like 'lighting protection,' 'spark arrestors,' 'RF ground,' or 'HAM radio ground.' Polyphaser has some nice technical bulletins.

"Here is a company that sells Cat-5 lightning protectors at 28–35$ a pop.

"I'm not endorsing either company, by the way."

Comments

[darr]

When it is time to replace the battery, just order it from Amazon as well. I have been using an UPS unit for many years and also learned the hard way.

[Mike]

Most cheap (less than $1k) UPS's are of the standby variety, so they actually feed your electronics (filtered, surge-protected) line power when not in battery mode, and switch over to batteries in case of power loss/brown out.

Thus the fact that they generate a sine wave only matters when running on battery power, which is probably too infrequent to worry about.

[Andy Kowalczyk]

The typical home network these days are several laptops or tablets (which basically have their own UPS builtin) running on a WiFi network.

A DSL MoDem and a wireless router plugged into a UPS could run for days.

[Dan Benjamin]

I've tried several UPS devices over the years, most of them costing about $80-$100. I was lucky to get even one to last up to 2 years. They would die w/o warning, but what irritated me just as much was that when the power would go off (or they were unplugged after having been charged)they would beep continuously, and wouldn't shut up. Not too funny when the power goes off at 3am. Yes there are more current units that have an off switch for the alert tone.

But what ticked me off the most was that on more than one occasion the unit would die w/o notice(one was a lower-priced Cyber power unit) during a power outage (or before) and no UPS functionality was apparent whatsoever, and didn't provide any protection. Since then I've used just Tripp-Lite Isobar power filtering and surge protection units.

Maybe the $160+ UPS units are built better and work properly, and are therefore worth looking into. If they really do so, then perhaps I'll change my personal definition of UPS from Unbelievable Piece of Sh_t back to Uninterruptible Power Supply.

[Steve Snyder]

At first I thought you were talking about UPS the parcel delivery company! I REALLY can't stand them! I do, on the other hand, love UPS power supplies!

[ctein]

Dear Darr and Dan,

Yes, a good point-- just as with data backups, it's important to periodically check to make sure your backup actually WORKS!

It's a good idea, once a month, to run a test. Recover something from your backup drive, just to make sure it's not corrupted. And shut off the line power to your UPS, to make sure it really does pick up the load.

Assuming your backup systems are infallible is about as realistic as assuming your primary systems are infallible.

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Dear Mike,

Yeah, the sine vs square thing only matters when the UPS kicks in. But then, it might matter? I dunno, I'll wait for the expert commentary to show up.

pax / Ctein

[Tom Robbins]

My past experience mirrors that of Dan B., unfortunately. But, Ctein's warning is certainly hard to ignore, so I just ordered the same unit. We'll see if it ever saves my bacon before the battery dies.

[Ronny A. Nilsen]

I got an UPS this summer, and it its protecting my QNAP file server with all my files and images. The QNAP is connected to the UPS with USB and will turn itself off if power does not return within one hour. That way the file server and its content is protected from corruption even when I´m not around to power down myself during an outage. The Mac Book Pro takes care of itself and goes into sleep when the battery runs down.

[RobinP]

A couple of weeks back we had a series of short power cuts as something went wrong during the major power rewiring of our nearest town - my Windows machine just rebooted without problem every time.

[Aaron Britton]

funny thing about UPS, I have had more problems with them (causing computer crashes, not working, creating all kinds of noise, and costing a bloody mint) then they have ever helped me out.

ONly once have they done there job, and I would not of lost anything at the time.

I just stay away from them.

[Will Frostmill]

I first bought a UPS after a scare involving a HD error, and have been really satisfied for many years.

I've had a number of inexpensive (55$) UPS units. I have one for the DSL modem, router, and DVR in the family room, and one for a very low power (45w) pc and an external hard drive that I use for photo storage. The goal there is to allow enough time to force a shutdown and prevent disk damage, which the software handles automatically via a usb connection. It is never connected to the internet, by the way, which I've found to be a great timesaver in missed OS patches alone.

By far the UPS on the DSL modem is the most useful - the internet never goes away anymore, and I'd estimate the runtime to be in hours, not minutes.

I also purchased one for my mom's mac mini, mostly for my peace of mind.

I'm interested in your fiber situation. My neighbor has fiber from Verizon, and it 'comes with' an 8 hour battery pack* to allow enough connectivity for a dial tone during outages. A requirement set by either the state public service commission or the FCC. Perhaps your utility has a similar requirement?

Will
*some exclusions required, read the fine print, and pay through the nose every month. I still have DSL.

[Steve Jacob]

I agree, but a word of caution...

Don't buy a cheap one. It is like buying a cheap parachute....

Don't rely on auto-shutdown software. Close apps and hibernate your PC/MAC (which parks the drives) when you are not around. The UPS can support this for hours and if the power does fail, the drives won't crash (it will just give an error on startup and force a cold boot).

Check the power requirements of everything that is attached. The UPS should COMFORTABLY exceed the maximum draw in case you have that outage in the middle of a 10 layer edit session, or level 3 of DOOM...

[Craig Williams]

For the cat5e we have used these to control surges on ultra sensitive measuring equipment. To stop any false measurements form anything coming into the room. I don't work for the company or have any relationship with them.
http://www.l-com.com/surge-protector-cat5-data-line-lightning-surge-protectors

Hope that helps.

[bloodnok]

i've been using cyberpower ups devices for years and have had too many power failures with which to test their effectiveness. passed with flying colours.

whereas a previous apc ups failed me - too long of a delay between the mains failing and it taking over meant the computer had already crashed. plus its battery life was pathetic.

[ctein]

Dear folks,

It's really really important to distinguish between surge protection and backup power. A *good* UPS includes surge protection, but that's a side benefit. Its primary function is to ensure power when the line voltage/amperage drops out.

Contrariwise, surge protectors offer no backup power whatsoever. Their function is to filter out spikes and transients that could fry equipment. They do no good if you lose power or have a brownout.

There are lots of crappy surge protectors out there–– pretty much anything built into a standard cheapo power strip. This is something you have to research fairly well, because unfortunately there is no way to test it yourself, whereas it's easy to test if a UPS actually works.

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
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[Dave in NM]

Thank you, Will.
I'll look into your recommendations.

[Peter]

Re: square vs. sine wave.

With the square wave, you get all of the harmonics for free!

[ctein]

Dear Peter,

Not true! You only get the ODD harmonics!

What a ripoff...

pax / Ctein

[Peter]

touche ;)

[Timo]

No comments regarding UPSes, beyond "yes, have one." But I wanted to suggest to Ctein perhaps he consider keeping all of his (data) files, even the Windows ones, on the Mac side of things.

I work on a lot of files in a VM environment, and I find my back-up needs have been greatly simplified by restricting the VM environment to only the OS and programs I need, with my data kept with my other Mac data and backed up via Time Machine and cloud backup.