Uninterruptible power supplies vs. surge protectors – which do you need?

November 21, 11:52 AMGadgets ExaminerDan Appleman

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Sometimes a surge protector isn't enough

You may think that a surge protector is giving you the protection you need, but in many cases you’d be wrong – dead (as in, dead equipment) wrong.

Most people know that electronic equipment should be plugged into a surge protector. A surge protector protect monitors the power line for short but intense voltage spikes – the kind of surge that can fry your electronic equipment. And they generally do a good job against that kind of surge – even protecting against intense surges such as those caused by nearby lightning strikes.

But there’s one thing to keep in mind about a surge protector: they do absolutely nothing to protect you against power loss. You’ve probably been indoors during a storm and seen the lights flicker or dim – those flickers or “brown outs” represent sudden drops in power or a lowering of the line voltage. They are typically caused by excessive load on the power grid – the kind of load caused when a power line on a nearby circuit shorts out (perhaps because a tree just fell on it). Between the time the short happens, and the power grid detects the short and cuts that part of the circuit out of the system, a brief outage or voltage drop can occur.

Surge protectors happily pass that voltage drop on to any attached equipment. They have no choice – a surge protector has no internal source of power to overcome the loss.

For most equipment, this poses little problem. Your appliances are designed to tolerate outages. Most of your entertainment equipment can handle it without suffering any damage (though you may have to reset the internal clock).

But there is one type of electronic device that you really don’t want suffering this type of outage – any device that contains a hard drive.

Part II - Uninterruptible power supplies – your hard drive’s best friend

Part III - Choosing an uninterruptible power supply