Power protection

- There is nothing that makes me more crazy insane than watch somebody go to a computer store, buy some new high-end motherboard, some beautiful new CPU, fancy cooling system, really high-end RAM, beautiful case, huge monitor, flashy lights, keyboard and mouse and they've spent X gazillions of dollars and now it's sticker shock time. And then the last thing everybody buys is power protection. And that's the one place where everybody goes really cheap. So, they end up spending, I don't know, let's take it over the top, thousands of dollars on a big high-end system and then they suddenly decide to become cheap and they buy a piece of junk power protection. So, in this episode, we're going to talk about the type of power protection you need for your systems. But before we get into the power protection, let's talk about what the problems are with power. And that comes from what we call spikes and sags. If you look at the power over time, that's coming from the power company, in a perfect world, what it generates is this beautiful sine wave. So 60 times a second, it goes from one point, it goes, it makes a peak, it makes a valley and then comes back to the zero point, so that is one hertz. Well, 60 times the second year in the States, that's what takes place. In reality, electricity is a tricky thing to get in good order from a power company. So, one of the things that will often take place is that it won't go all the way up to 120 volts in one direction either way and it'll start doing stuff like this. In this case, you're never getting 120 volts. At best, you might be getting 60 volts or something like that. It's not zero. You are getting electricity, but the power company, a transformer goes out or something takes place and suddenly, you are getting what we call a sag. Sometimes you'll hear the term brownout. That means you're not getting enough voltage. This can keep your computer from running and can cause reboots. Far more dangerous, however, is this. There are situations where instead of getting 120 volts here in the States, you might suddenly get 300 volts in the States and then it'll come back down, act normal for a minute and then boom, another one. These are called spikes. Spikes is when you're suddenly provided far more voltage than what you're expecting. Spikes are dangerous because they can literally destroy your computer. Spikes are also known as surges. So a spike and a surge is the same thing. A sag and a brownout is the same thing. Okay, so sags and brownouts are not a happy thing. It might make our computer reboot. A spike or a surge can destroy your system. So at the very least, we're always going to try to find some device that's going to be a surge suppressor, a surge protector, they go by a lot of different names. Their job is to catch those big spikes of voltage and just basically eat them in themselves, so it doesn't carry it onward into your system itself. There's lots of 'em out here. I've got an example right here. Now, this surge suppressors is pretty typical. There's a few things I want to mention, though when we talk about surge suppressors. First of all, I always like to have one with, well, if I can get it, an on off switch 'cause I like to, it's actually on. And secondly, a trip alert, or it can be one simple button that does both. All of a sudden, it's on and it goes off all of a sudden. The reason I like that is because yes, it's inconvenient to have my computer suddenly turn off. However, certain power companies are notorious for bad electricity. Now, I'm not going to name any names (coughs) Houston, but there are certain cities here in the US that just are a little bit notorious for not giving us that beautiful sine wage voltage that we like. And I want to know that there is a problem like that. Yes, it's great that it absorbs the spikes, it absorbs those surges, but I also want to know it's happening. So, that's where I'm willing to let the thing kick off so that I can notice that that's taking place. So while we're talking about surge suppressors, they don't just stop in terms of what you can plug into them. You can get surge suppressors that will protect your ethernet cabling. You can have, if you're actually still using it, you can find surge suppressors that protect landlines for telephone. Yeah, I still got one, why not? But even things like USB. A lot of us love to charge our USB devices, we use those little AC adapters, so it's convenient if I have something I could just plug my USB into, why not have something I can plug my USB into and at the same time, prevent those surges from destroying USB device, I might choose to be charging in any given moment. So, they're great. Don't worry about UL ratings or any official government body ratings. They used to be pretty common with surge suppressors but today, they're also good that pretty much what they'll do is a big company will go out to some independent laboratory that's not a government agency and hand you a piece of paper. That's about anything that's good for it anymore. The only downside to cheap surge suppressors is that a cheap one will be a good surge suppressor one time and then it turns into a power strip. So again, that's why I like to know when things are tripping. And also for me, if I'm paying less than well, here in the US about 25 to $30 for a surge suppressor, I'm probably getting one that will only work well one time. Now, if you really want to do things right, what you wannao go to is a beastie like this. What you're looking at here is an Uninterruptable Power Supply or UPS. UPS's protect not only from spikes and surges, they help protect you from sags and brownouts. Now, think about this for a minute. How would it do that? In order to do that, it would have to make electricity. If things don't give you enough, somebody's going to have to pour some electricity in. And that's because inside every one of these guys is some kind of, well, traditionally, they were motorcycle batteries, although the industry today makes their own special batteries for UPS's. These batteries pick up whatever your power company doesn't provide. So, they're batteries, so they have a certain amount of time that they can do stuff depending on how much you're pulling off of them. So, when we buy these different types of UPS's, what we're going to do, first of all, no one's going to test you on how long does a UPS last because no one can answer that question because we don't know how much your system's pulling. But there's a few things that we can talk about. In general, one of the big things is if you take a look on the top of this system right here, you're going to see that one side of this it says battery backup surge protection. This is the only plugs on this system that actually provide protection against sags and brownouts. Over here, this is just a surge protector. So number one, you want to make sure you know where you're plugging them in. Many UPS makers provide a software interface between your UPS and your system that allows you to monitor it. So here's a screenshot of an example of this. So you can see, it can tell you how many minutes of reserve power is in the battery right now and that can often be a very convenient tool to give you an idea of how well your UPS is working. All of these companies, I've got APC brand here in front of me which I like APC quite a bit. When I'm going to buy myself a UPS, I'm going to go onto the APS website and it's going to talk about how much time, and it's usually measured in minutes, this is not hours. The idea is that you lose power and then all of a sudden, you have 15 minutes, 20 minutes on a really nice one, maybe 30 minutes, where you can actually power the system down. So you don't look at these things as, oh, well, we've lost power because of a hurricane, so I'm just going to keep running. No, it gives you enough time to shut the machine down in a pretty way. If you want to have something that's going to survive when you've lost power for hours, now you're talking about backup generator systems or something like that, which will provide power, so don't confuse those. In my opinion, about the only thing that I'm going to use simply a surge protector for anymore is going to be really inexpensive stuff. For example, I've got some flatbed scanners that cost me 80 bucks each and a couple of cheap printers. Those I might put on a surge protector. Almost any other system that I use today, I have UPS for. I'm talking about in my house, I'm talking about in the office, I'm talking about in the server room. In today's world, UPS's are powerful, reliable, they work great and why bother protecting just from surge and spikes when you can protect from sags and brownouts just as well with the same box?