It's the end of summer here in the Coachella Valley. It's been hot, will be hot and stay hot until probably the end of September.
While my area has been pretty good for not having outages, occasionally cars hit power poles, the grid gets overlaoded and power goes out.
In June, we lost power for aabout an hour when a metallic balloon got tangled up in the power lines and took a portion of the grid down.
As a computer consultant, customers have brought in Mac and PC desktops that were crashed when the power went down and the computer was not shut down correctly. Laptops, if the battery is still holding charge, can provide power until you get to shut down the operating system correctly.
What's the solution?
Backup Batteries.
What are they?
Backup batteries are plugged into the wall and then you plug your desktop and a monitor into it.
If the power goes out, the battery takes over the supply of electricity, and you can properly shut the system down while you wait for the power to be restored.
This is especially important - especially if you are working on a project and perhaps have not saved the file yet. While many operating systems - Mac, PC and Linux - may have some ability to recover from an un-scheduled shut down, there are software products that do not recover too well if you have not saved the file first and then exited the program.
I run a larger capacity battery in my office and have two desktops plugged into it.
When we lost power last June, I was able to quickly save my projects and shut down both computers.
CyberPower and APC make great battery backup systems with ranges for most home and office users.
While the lower priced models might work for a small desktop like a mini-tower and a monitor (400v-600v), the larger capacity battery backups are needed for those of us with larger towers that are used for gaming, video and photography editing, as they have a larger drain.
These are the 800v-1500v versions and will provide a longer run time before the system will need to be shut down.
Here is a link to some of your options on Amazon.
