Uninterruptible power supply (UPS)

A life jacket for your electronics

What do an editor designing your company’s magazine from a home desktop computer and the chief financial officer drafting the company’s year-end financials have in common? Both scenarios require a computer with constant power to complete the task. In the event of a power outage or interruption in power supply, you could lose your entire day’s worth of work.

If you or your business cannot afford to have power interruptions, we recommend purchasing an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). Think of a UPS as a life jacket for your precious electronics.

A UPS is a battery backup power system whose sole purpose is to provide power to your devices when the primary source of power fails. So if a power outage or blink in power occurs, a UPS keeps your hard work afloat and allows you to continue working for a range of time. It mostly provides enough time to save those crucial documents and shut down your equipment properly.

Like a life jacket, a UPS provides safety – safety against other common power issues you might experience. It protects your valuable devices and data from experiencing power surges or blinks that can occur like a ghost in the background without you knowing it.

If you have a generator, you might be thinking, shouldn’t that protect me when the power goes out? It would provide you power, yes, but not protection. A UPS differs from a generator because it provides instant power during emergencies and power failure. A generator only acts as a standby power, which means your precious devices will still shut off during the power outage and only resume if the generator is already powered on.

UPS systems have three different typologies, or categories, based on the type of power protection you need. The three typologies are standby, line-interactive, and double-conversion.

Standby offers the most basic features, providing you surge protection and battery backup. Standby satisfies a small business or home’s needs, like powering personal computers.

Line-interactive is similar to standby, but with the addition of a variable-voltage autotransformer. This type of UPS can tolerate continuous undervoltage brownouts and undervoltage surges.

In an online double-conversion UPS, the batteries are always connected to the inverter so that no power transfer switches are necessary. Double-conversion UPSs are the safest and most expensive kind of power protection.

COMMON POWER PROBLEMS:

Surge

A brief, but intense, spike in electricity commonly caused by lightning. Surges can damage and destroy electronics, and the intense “spike of electricity” or spike in voltage and current harms circuit boards and components.