Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

It has a picture of a totally cool Humvee loaded with what looks like enough communications tech to contact Pluto. Yes, this is our kind of technology.

Most Rugged Uninterruptible Power Supply units and power conditioners – and we didn’t know this – “remain ‘on’ during vehicle and power equipment roll-overs due to shock, vibration, or kinetic impact during combat,” Acumentrics officials say.

But Acumentrics officials say UPS systems remaining on in those situations “pose a safety risk to vehicle occupants, power generators, and sensitive electronic equipment.” So to deal with that risk, Acumentrics has introduced the Rugged-UPS 2500 DC Series, which senses the orientation of the vehicle or piece of equipment and shuts off.

These units can also send a 12 VDC trigger signal to another system, company officials say, to relay an emergency alarm or activate another safety-related device, for example.

"Our UPS and power conditioner systems are used in harsh physical and electrical environments," observed Jeff Boudreau, Senior Applications Engineer at Acumentrics. "We have tens of thousands of units working in military field operations. Typical applications where this shut-off feature is particularly helpful include Humvees, ships, trains, planes, tracked vehicles, and construction equipment where significant roll, inversions, or vibrations would present a dangerous situation to personnel or power sources."

In other power protection news, Minuteman – a leader in power protection technologies –sat down with TMCnet to discuss whether power protection products are worth the upfront cost. The answer, according to Minuteman, is yes.

“One study conducted by J.D. Power & Associates found that the average business experiences 5.7 outages per year,” Duston Nixon, marketing communications specialist at Minuteman, told TMCnet. “Without protection, this means that 5.7 times per year business cannot be conducted. Though the average outage lasts only 10 minutes, the time to reboot equipment is much longer, not to mention time lost due to unsaved work and/or corrupted data. ”The frightening part of all of this for business owners is that actual power outages only account for about 5 percent of power problems,” he added. “Other problems such as sags/brownouts, surges, and spikes can dramatically shorten equipment life and corrupt valuable data.”