It's saved my uptime probably dozens of times

Edit: is saved my hardware from damage probably zero times though

Its a bit of a "prove a negative" kind of situation no? You can't know if the UPS saved anything if you dont have a control.

Complete tangent, but those small UPS's can often be easily converted into an inverter for a car. Replace the battery with a cigarette plug, and you can plug it in to your car and get 240/120AC in your car. You might need to kill the buzzer, but otherwise its a pretty easy mod.

Yes, 0 times. It has kept the power going through brown outs and stuff, so there is that.

Also, I try to always use surge protectors at least on valuable equipment. The UPS is flair. :3

Me with 4 HDDs spinning during a brownout:

Not having a UPS is like running through a cornfield with your junk hanging out.

There’s a chance a leaf or stalk will catch you just right and give you a gnarly paper cut on your genitals.

Why risk it?

I have a couple. Have they saved me from anything... other than power outages no. Just installed a really nice one. 10KW (2 units) to start with and will be expanding it when I can afford another 6000 to get two more. I've already had some short power outages and kept the whole house running without issue. https://enphase.com/store/storage/gen3/iq-battery-5p. Once they quit I have about 10 minutes of power for my server, 90 minutes for my router, wifi, switches, ont, and cellular backup.

I had electric outage for 4 hours, nobody in my userbase saw the difference, but I never managed to make my debian detect the outage so I can get a mail about the fact that there is an outage (I'm not always home).

Btw if anyone here knows how detect them outages with ups plugged in with usb on my server it would be amazing !

Hi. Computer guy here. How many times has a UPS saved me/my clients' machines? Too many to count- BUT

I do have a story of a UPS absolutely ruining my day if anyone is interested.

I am considering getting one but power outages are pretty much unheard of, so it's not really a priority. So far it would have saved me 0 times.

I use an ecoflow UPS power station and it's served its purpose well. It hooks up to home assistant and if power levels go below a certain percentage iHA sends shutdown requests over ssh to my Nas and server.

would have been 8 times this year but I dont have one

I have UPSs between the wall and every expensive electronic in my house.

I think I have seven or eight now.

My god, perhaps once a week. I live in an area with shitty grid service, so because of my UPS I have uptime on my servers measured in hundreds of days

You wouldn't ask that question if you lived in an area with shitty power network. With daily brownouts, momentary power losses and voltage spikes your equipment will survive much less than it could. I had a router die because of that.

It's impossible to measure this impact at home, but it's there even on much more stable networks.

I have three UPSs.

Two at my desk: The smallest for my daily driver NUC, Eaton S3 850VA (510 W max) and enough for that purpose. The second is an Eaton Ellipse Pro 850 (510 W max) for my gaming PC. I want to replace both with a single device that has enough Oomph for both., but yet have to find a suitable model without fan noise at a reasonable price.

The largest is a APC SMT1000 that I got used without batteries, that I use in my rack for networking devices, some additional small devices, a Lenovo m920x and a custom build server (NAS, proxmox etc.). Usually the draw from the wall for that is 200 W. I added LiFePo packs instead of the Pb ones, as they are much more durable: 10 years instead of 2 to 3 years. As LiFePo packs have around 50 % continues load vs the Pb, the UPS ist purposefully oversized.

Where I live, we barely have outages, but they occasionally happen. Around once in two years. So it's more a peace of mind. Hard to say, how often they in fact 'saved' anything.

Edit: Edited battery chemistry to LiFePo. Did an oopsie there. Corrected typo.

Ok a little out if left field here, but one time after our first child was just born and we had a power outage we used the UPS to power my wife’s breast pump.

Lightning hit the transformer outside my old wartime era apartment complex.

The sound my ups made was like a thousand angry bees.

All of my lights and fuses were blown and the ups battery melted.

But all my equipment plugged into it was fine.

I grew up in a place where home electricity wasn’t reliable and we got power outages several times a week. Portable UPS units like in the post were still pretty expensive back then and it was a luxury when we finally got one for our shared family computer. Our setup was basically power socket > AVR > UPS > PC.

I have two APC550s that are powering my computers only and not the displays or peripherals.

Voltage spikes and brownouts are a constant thing where I live, the variation is enough to play holy hell with the modem and wifi so to save my sanity, every electronic device is attached to something that backs up or cleans up the power.

For the laptops, I have them attached to straight power conditioners (isotel 4s) so at least the adapter blocks won't get messed up.

Given my main computer is a 2008 MacPro, running an unsupported modern macOS install and the thing's been running constantly for at least a year now (it's asleep ATM) I'm not complaining. Same for my gaming PC..

The hardware I have owes me nothing.

I've been saved by ZFS 100x more than my UPSs. Not the least of which because the shitty Bluetti I bought to try to do it on the cheap keeps saying there's an AC short randomly over night (roughly once every month) even though all attached equipment should be well within its power limits even at their max.

Yes and they save me all the time. My area is hit or miss when a storm rolls through. Sometimes the power goes out, sometimes it doesn't.

Mine is there strictly to cover the fraction of a second it takes my solar to take over in the event of a mains flicker or loss... and it's saved me from that dozens of times.

I have one at my parents summer house. I think the answer is 0, but I'm not sure because I think before I bought it some equipment did break and since then not anymore. But it's already so old that the battery practically doesn't hold any electricity anymore (it's over 10 years old), and things still don't break.

I have an old one. The battery is dead, I could replace it, but I didn't really see the value. Power going out isn't a terrible thing in my view, it happens so rarely for me. It's a time to reflect and choose simpler activities.

The habit of saving early and saving often is so ingrained, I'd not lose more than a few minutes of effort on whatever I might be doing at the time that's mildly important to me.

I had one maybe 6-7 years back. Power went out once and I went to my PC which was in the middle of a job and shut it down gracefully.

Nowadays, I raw dog it and structure the jobs I run to be idempotent.

Yes and never. I haven't even had a power outage yet, but it did keep my stack running while I rolled the rack over to use a different outlet.

My setup is a bit overkill...

my lab has oscillating power at some locations, UPS gives stable voltage and we have not had a power supply blow since.

I'm fortunate enough to live in a region with an extremely stable powergrid.

But it makes a loud clack when switching to battery power which I witnessed once over the last three years. Presumably just some power fluctuations that exceeded a certain threshold (since power worked fine afterwards and it immediately went back to being powered by mains) but that could already be enough to shut down my server.

Either way, I like to believe it has saved my data once and the purchase was worth it.

Yep, just got one!

Yeah I have 3, 2 at my desk for my switch and computer, and then one across the room with my router and home server.

So far they haven't really saved anything but I invested in them after a power outage killed my whole PC.

I have a CyberPower 1500VA AVR UPS.

Some time ago, I had an electrical fault on one of two devices - either my Logitech Z906 subwoofer or a cheap power supply for a cheap monitor. Both failed at the same time and were connected to the UPS.

There’s a known issue with the Logitech Z906 where a pair of underrated resistors can blow. They had both exploded, and had also taken out a step down regulator elsewhere on the board.

So, the UPS seems to have failed to protect from an electrical fault of another connected device.

Hard to say how many times it has saved me from power surges and the like, I have everything expensive behind a UPS or surge protection so I don’t have equipment failures to compare against.

For the most part, UPS have allowed me to stay online after a power outage to tell my friends the power went out.

There were a few circumstances where my partner tripped a breaker and I was able to restore power without getting disconnected from a game.

It has allowed me to finish multiple counter-strike matches when the power cuts out

I don't have any cool stories like yours but last time we had a power outage I probably wouldn't have noticed if I didn't have HA set to notify me. That's mostly due to the house setup (solar inverter and batteries) but we do also have a couple of cheap, dumb UPS units which keep the ONT and one of the APs online, which for house layout reasons aren't on backup power otherwise.

That said the power where I am is a bit dirty - before we had the inverter put in we had some really nasty brownouts that I'm amazed didn't immediately kill anything. So it's entirely possible that the backup power has saved something from a premature end.

We loaded some heavy equipment batteries into the basement under our tech shop.

Then we ghetto-linked them in parallel and had two APCs feeding them and feeding off them. Electricians would stare at the diagram for 20 minutes before deciding it wasn't gonna catch everything on fire.

We lost power due to a backhoe failure up the road. We ran an entire office and a rack of gear for 8 hours.

Thanks for the reminder to order new batteries for one of mine and one of my parents UPS's.

Will a UPS provide any benefit on a non-grounded outlet?

I have a ups mostly so my wireless will stay active for as long as the laptops in a power outage.

My old one died so I upgraded to one that actually has enough capacity for my whole setup. The machine I previously didn't have capacity for and so was left on wall power hasn't been damaged by any power outages or electrical mishaps as far as I know, but it will at least be nice to not have to worry about unexpected shutdowns whenever an outage happens.