Question about battery backups...

[Neomage]

Well, after hearing about about the frequent power outages in my area, I got a battery backup for Christmas! Wohoo! The only problem is, I'm not sure it's big enough... It's labeled as 750 VA and 450 w, but my PSU is a 750 w. Does anyone know if I need to get a bigger backup, or will this one work?

[KingOfZeal]

Re: Question about battery backups...

The 750 rating on your power supply has to do with the power output, not the required input. The higher that rating, the more things you can hook up to it without failure (partial or otherwise). Wattage is just a measurement of power over time. More wattage means more power over the same amount of time.

So, the real question, is how much stuff do you have hooked up to the supply? Is it just the motherboard, a hard drive, an optical drive and maybe a video card, or are there 3 giant hard drives, 2 DVD+-RWs, quad powered video cards and a large water-cooling system?

The first should be alright, but the second not so much. And, if you REALLY want to know... just make sure the new backup is fully charged with everything you want plugged into it, then unplug the backup from the house circuit. Presto, you have your answer. The worst that should happen is the computer would be turned off immediately. It's possible that the backup won't last as long as it's rated (in hours) as well, in which case you just leave everything on and time how long it takes for it all to turn off.

[Neomage]

Re: Question about battery backups...

I don't have a huge amount of stuff hooked up to it... probably somewhere between the two you mentioned. Just 1 hard drive, one nvidia 8800 GT, Dual-Core CPU... IT should probably work then. I'll try that unpluging trick out then. Thanks for the help.

[Mhurron]

Re: Question about battery backups...

Most consumer UPS's will run between 10-15 minutes on battery power. You might get more but they're not meant to run your computer through an extended outage. Their benefit is 2 fold; one you have time to properly shutdown when you're at the machine and two, using the included software (if it has USB port) it can shut down the machine if you're not there.

Make sure that only important stuff is plugged into the battery ports. Speakers, external optical drives and what not are not important. You only need the tower, monitor and any external HDD plugged in to the battery to shut things down. Plug the rest into a surge protector.

[Lunaryn]

Re: Question about battery backups...

Depends on the model and your computer as to how long you can squeeze out of it. I've got a consumer UPS that's rated for about 5-15 minutes worth of power, I have my server (and not its monitor) plugged into it, and that actually gets me the better part of an hour of runtime before the battery runs out. If I know I'm going to be dealing with hours of outage, I switch the monitor over to the battery backup portion in order to do a manual shutdown. I also have the cable modem plugged into the battery backup portion so that in the event of an outage network services stay up and I can do a remote shutdown if necessary (provided that only the power and not the cable is out).

Of course, my server is a fairly low-power box, all in all. A desktop actually using all its resources, and especially a monitor, will drain the battery much faster.