The Things We Take for Granted in Our Small Business 1
Last time I was here I talked about the way a power outage here in town had a affected our favourite Italian restaurant. It caught us too - a half-written email was lost and a large file download had to be re-started so we were quite lucky. It could have been a lot worse.
But it made us realise that power is one of those things we take for granted in our small business. We rely on the power grid to supply uninterrupted power free from spikes and drops in current. We need that so we can keep working and ensure that our fragile computers keep working too.
Of course there are always going to be power outages and Murphy’s Law will always tell you that the outages will occur at the worst possible times so we decided to do something about it.
For the last few days I’ve been sitting here with an MGE Ellipse 750 UPS System under the desk. The UPS stands for uninterrupted power supply and I’m running two monitors and one computer through it.
The UPS consists of a single small box that contains two batteries and some control equipment. The box is plugged into the power socked and the computer and monitors are plugged into the box. If the power goes out or the voltage drops the batteries supply power for up to 15 minutes - more than enough time to shut everything down in an orderly fashion.
The box doesn’t run hot and there have been no glitches at all. A little monitoring icon that sits in the toolbar has shown me though that we’ve had more voltage drops than I would have expected.
For under $200.00 that seems like money well-spent to us and today Toni will be bringing two more back from the computer shop to keep our other two PCs running the next time the power goes out.
