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dicion wrote:*Looks at the 1500VA he has his DSL modem and related networking equipment plugged into...

... I still had internet access 3 days after Ike because of that thing! Sure, I had to use my laptop, but still!

I don't do anything small, for me, it's go big, or go home

You only have one 1500? Of course, I have DSL modem, switch, and 2 computers running on one, and all of my ham radio equipment running off the other one.

Actually none of these quite compare to a telephone central office, where the battery bank is absolutely huge, and all the essential stuff runs off the batteries which are constantly kept charged. A properly equipped telephone CO can run for two days on just the battery.

When I was a kid, growing up in a rural area with a telephone engineer for a father, we had a similar battery bank in our basement, it took up an entire room. The lead acid batteries had to be routined and their specific gravity and charge levels checked on a weekly basis, which I learned to do when I was about eight. You should have seen me in the rubber apron and gloves, not to mention the safety goggles.

Ours was NOT a true UPS, though, because it used an armstrong switching method - when the power went off, someone went down to the basement and threw the big switch, with a small baseball bat size handle, and the lights came back on. Ours would be the only house lit up for miles around, and we got lots of visitors on cold winter nights.

I swear... when I first saw the thread title, I thought it was about little tiny H&K pistols. OK, so I'm an idiot!

Not sure, about super small ones, but I have 2 cyberpower UPS that the TV, computer, modem, and cable box hooked up to. Kinda cool that it keeps everything going when I trip the breaker (too much stuff running at the same time) The honker of a laser printer usually trips it because it draws so much juice powering up.

a large majority of ups's are not online ones.meaning they run off the battery and charge it at the same time. an online ups is very expensive. just get one that say it has AVR: automatic voltage regulation.