After moving to Bangalore, it turns out that I would need to get one or more UPS’s for the machines at home. The place we will be moving to in a few weeks does have power backup, but if/when there is a power cut it takes a few minutes for the generators to kick in and is not instantaneous as I was thinking.
I have never bought a UPS until now and don’t have any experience with it - what are the things that I need to consider? I will have the following equipment running which will need to be powered up for about 15 minutes:
- 4 Desktops (including a MCE and WHS)
- Two 17” LCD Monitors
- A set of powered Speakers (optional)
- Few switches
- KVM Switch
- VOIP Phone
- Wireless Router
- DSL Modem
Would it make sense to buy a few smaller UPS’s instead of one big one? Which is a good one? How much wattage/capacity should I look to get? Can one get second-hand ones - are they recommended? Does the UPS required any maintenance or are they maintenance free these days? :-?
Of all the machines, the WHS is one of the most critical ones. Is there any UPS’s which work well with some Add-Ins? I am interested in WHS shutting down in an orderly fashion so as to save all the data whenever the UPS battery gets low (in case for some reason the generators don’t kick in).