Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

Minuteman UPS/Para Systems, a leader in power technology products, recognizes that not only is it a daunting task to select the correct uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) to prevent power disturbances, but it is at times to difficult to really fathom how a UPS can save the day.

In a recent video, the power protection company demonstrates exactly how a UPS works to make your life easier and discusses that power complications are more common than they may seem.

“What you need to recognize is with uninterruptible power supplies, they protect 100 percent of the power problems,” Erik Knecht, director of channel development for minuteman, explains in the video. “A lot of folks out there will put a surge strip out and what they don’t realize is that only protects for about seven percent of the power problems.”

An UPS offers power protection as it contains batteries that provide backup power to your system in the event of a power outage to give you the time to safely save all open files and shutdown the system or even continue to work until normal power has been restored.

During the video, Knecht asks viewers to think back to a time when they used their desktop computers and all of a sudden the keyboard froze and they were unable to type. While it may be easy to think that the keyboard simply malfunctioned, the reason the keyboard froze was most likely because of a voltage problem.

“You have had a brownout,” Knect says of times like this. “Voltage has dipped to an unsafe level.  When your keyboard locks, your CPU needed ‘x’ amount of voltage to function and when it doesn’t get it, it looks at peripheral things it doesn’t need to function. If you had a UPS it would have corrected the problem and you wouldn’t have had that issue.”

The video highlights how the UPS monitors voltage levels and compensates accordingly when the voltage on the unprotected product is too low or too high. And, since power outages and brownouts happen without warning, investing in a UPS device is of the utmost importance, according to Minuteman officials.

There are three types of UPSs that customers can purchase: standby, line-interactive and online UPS.

Standby UPS, the “economical unit,” according to Knecht, is a surge strip with batteries attached. The power protection product stands by and waits for the power to come in at an unsafe level and when that happens it switches the battery to solve the power problem. When power is restored to a safe level, it will switch back to AC power to keep equipment running.

Line-interactive UPS, referred to as automatic voltage regulation, takes the incoming voltage and boosts it up if it’s too low or reduces it if it’s too high. The video shows how the line-interactive UPS works.

Online UPS, or double conversion UPS, takes the A/C power coming out of the wall converts it to D/C and back to A/C on the output side.

“It provides by far the cleanest and best power protection that you can find on the market,” Knecht argues, noting that manufacturing facility or places that have generators can benefit most from this UPS.

Recently, a Frost and Sullivan survey indicated that whether they work at a small or medium-sized business, IT managers want longer battery runtimes for their UPS power protection products. In an age where companies are often performing twice the amount of tasks with fewer resources, power outages can be especially crippling. In addition to having their data systems compromised, companies sometimes have to dole out thousands of dollars to get their system back up and running if they do not have the right team or equipment in place.