Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

We write quite a bit here at TMCnet about various and sundry technologies, but one that comes up again and again is UPS, or Uninterruptible Power Supply.

For the uninitiated, a UPS provides needed power when your main power suddenly goes out. Why would you need something like that? My wife found out just this week.

Pattie works at home as a freelance toy and package designer. The work is complicated, as she needs to be both a “creative” and an engineer, to design a package that looks pleasing to the eye but “works” well enough to hold the desired product. This involves a lot of time on the computer, and if she doesn’t save early and often, critical work can be easily lost.

She recently decided (as wives will do), that our dining room needed to be emptied and have the oak floor re-done. This involved much moving and logistics, to ensure the space was clear when the workers arrived early on a Monday morning.

If you’ve ever had a floor “done”, you’d know that the huge sanding machine they utilize uses a lot of power. So much so, that while one guy was using the big machine, his colleague was using a handheld sander for the tight spaces. And suddenly, they blew the circuits.

Fixing it was just a matter of heading to the basement and resetting the breakers. But two floors up, our Resident Artist was finishing a critical job when the lights went out. Fortunately, she had listened to “someone’s” advice a while back, and plugged her computer into a UPS. She bought herself a precious few minutes to save what she’d been painstakingly working on before all was lost.

The guys got the power back on and went back to work, only to have the breakers blow twice more, before they figured out that maybe they shouldn’t use both sanders at once. (You think?)

This reporter was informed about all this via a carefully worded (albeit profanity-ridden) email.

The bottom line? The floor’s done, it “looks great!” and most importantly, someone’s morning full of work is completed and shipped off to the client, all thanks to a correctly installed UPS.

Think about it: What would you do if your computer conked out in the middle of an important piece of work? A UPS makes sense, but the time to get one is well before you need one.