As time progressed, he wondered if they’d ever use it. On the heels of that experience, John had a KOHLER 20 RESA home generator installed in early 2012. “If we had had January temperatures, we would have had to find a motel or stay with a relative for our own safety.” The storm brought low temperatures, so they slept under extra blankets and felt lucky that winter cold hadn’t set in. Since refrigerators and freezers can only keep food safe for a very limited amount of time during an outage, the Donaldsons ate their food as fast as they could but ended up losing a lot of it. We were very, very fortunate that the local hardware store was open on generator power, and they still had five-gallon water jugs we could buy, but they were going fast.” “We had filled up the bathtubs, but it turns out bathtub drains aren’t designed to hold a seal for days. What was the first thing that Donaldson and his wife needed? “Water!” says Donaldson. It was difficult not to panic, and for the next four days we had a taste of how people lived in the 1700s - with no electricity, no lights, no central heat. Since our well pump and furnace blower run on electricity, we knew we had some serious problems! When I realized that the pressure-assist toilets and garage door also needed power, there weren’t a lot of options. We sat in front of the fireplace in our winter coats to stay warm, burned all the wood we had and worried about our safety and whether the pipes would freeze. “Without a power outage plan, we were scared and unsure of what to do or how to react. “We didn’t know how important it was to have backup power until the storm brought snow that weighed down trees, and they were snapping and going down all over the place - that knocked out our power for four days!” says Donaldson. That’s when the so-called “Halloween nor’easter” roared through the mid-Atlantic states, dumping up to ten inches of wet, heavy snow on the Donaldson home in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. After all, a backup generator is a significant investment, and he had lived in his house for years, with the longest power outage lasting just five hours. An online UPS doesn't have a switching time at all, and won't cause the computer to reboot.Like many folks, John Donaldson was on the fence about buying backup power for his home. If you live somewhere with a lot of power issues, you may even need an online UPS, where it is constantly converting the AC power from the wall to DC and charging the battery, and converting it back to AC to power the computer. If not, I'd recommend either replacing the power supply in the computer (if it is old, cheap, or underpowered for the system it's in), or getting a better UPS. If it is a defect, the manufacturer should replace it for you free of charge. Plug something like an LED light in and see if it turns off for a noticeable amount of time, longer than the time it goes off when switching to battery. I can't think of any way to test this except to wait for the next brownout. But if you have a weak or cheaply made power supply in your computer, it may not be able to handle it. Power supplies usually have big enough capacitors in them to run for a few milliseconds after they lose power. In most cases, it switches fast enough that the connected devices don't notice. Usually it's less than 10ms, but it could be that yours is slower or simply defective. This rating is probably NOT the same as the transfer time (where it switches to battery). However, while it is adjusting you lose power for a few milliseconds. My suspicion is that the UPS isn't switching fast enough for the computer.Ī line-interactive UPS handles brownouts without relying on the battery by using an adjustable transformer - the transformer adjusts the incoming voltage to the proper 110 or 220V that you normally get. Contact the manufacturer and see if they have any suggestions. Usually there will be a log inside the UPS that it can read that will show you when and why it failed. Connect the USB cable that came with the UPS and install the software. Depending on the model of the UPS, you might be able to get some information from the monitoring software that comes with it.
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