Power or electricity is used to run electronic devices such as computers, servers in the office & home appliances to name a few. In today’s working environment, we are heavily dependent on the use of electronic equipment to make our work faster and easier. The quality of power transmitted is not always clean from fluctuations, thus you need a gadget to effectively control or manage each surge or spikes in power, hence the role of UPS devices as part of office requirement becomes a necessity.
Most of us just buy a UPS with the premise that it will allow us to properly shutdown our computers and avoid data loss or device malfunction due to blackouts and power surge. Inside the UPS, it has batteries (heart of the system), rectifier (charging the battery to store power like an alternator inside the car), and inverter (converting the incoming power from DC to AC)
To further understand the worth of the device that you are buying, a STANDBY/OFFLINE UPS(Uninterruptible Power Supply) is basically a simple inverter with battery that allows you continuously use your electronic gadgets when power failures occures, it’s also the cheapest category you can find in the market. The length of time that you can stay on battery mode depends on the capacity of the UPS that you are using and the total load or wattage of all electrical equipment connected to the device. In most shops around, you may encounter the naming convention like 600VA, 800VA, 1600VA, 2KVA and so on.
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on the other hand some UPS comes with Voltage Regulator, though it cost more than your standby or offline UPS.
For companies having a network and maintaining a server, might as well use the ONLINE UPS, which gives a clean and stable supply of power(it continuously filters power thru the battery) to your electronic gadgets, . This type of UPS costs more than the rest of the category.
The most common one which most of us are contented to use due to price competitiveness (priced higher than offline but way below as compared to ONLINE ups) is the Line Interactive UPS , it handles fluctuations by the use of special type of transformer which varies the output voltage in response to fluctuations/surge without switching to battery mode.
Some power back up system has features to choose from like number of outlets it can support, maximum load capacity, real-time monitoring, battery run-time & how often the batteries are for maintenance schedule.
Choose the right one & invest on UPS devices to protect your electronic equipment and minimize loss on stored critical data/information.