Re:surge proctector with a higher joule rating or UPS with a lower joule rating?
2011/01/25 08:47:57
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You are talking apples and oranges. A surge protector, helps but is not a 100% surge protector item. Unless you buy a high dollar model (e.g. a commercial model) there's no guarantee it will really work when needed. There is a lot of hype in the advertising for these items.
A UPS on the other hand, provides surge protection plus battery and AC power backup. You don't want to lose power in the middle of a recording session or even mixing or whatever. True Sonar will backup at the interval you set, but a sudden power failure with the PC running and you could corrupt the hard drive and lose everything. Thus the UPS system is the most logical AC power source system.
How much of a UPS you need depends on your power requirements and how long you want your system to run on backup. I worked in computers and networking management and studies have found that most AC power failures are either momentary or very brief - and that is where the UPS shines and takes care of. A UPS that will deliver approx 10 minutes of battery power to the PC would take care of the momentary's and also allow you to do an orderly shutdown of the system on a prolonged AC outage.
In the networking compter room that I used to manage we had a large UPS system (300KVA at 480 VAC) for the entire room that would run for approx 10 and at the 5 minute mark, if we were still on battery our backup AC power generators would start up and sync with the AC power line and if we were still on backup at the 10 minute mark they would automatically go on line. I know this is overkill for a studio or home PC system - but it shows what the computer industry does.
Finally, the other consideration on a UPS is the power supply in your PC. New PC's are coming with the "Active PFC" power supplies. Some of these will only work with "true sine wave" (on battery backup) output UPS systems and some will work with a standard stepped (pseudo sine wave) output UPS provided the switching time is 4Ms or less.
Bottom line, the only real solution for PC's is a UPS. I also use a UPS on my new HD TV for AC power line protection.
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