> Our power grid is very reliable. Looking at availability information from “uptimed“, my home file server has been powered on for 99.97% of the time in the last 14 years. That includes time spent moving house and a day when the house power was off for several hours while the kitchen was refitted!
> However, in December 2023 a fault with our electric oven popped the breaker for the sockets causing everything to be harshly powered off. My fileserver took it badly and one drive died. That wasn’t a huge issue as it has a redundant filesystem, but I didn’t like it.
> I decided I could afford to treat myself to a relatively cheap UPS.
Just from that, I'd say he for-sure should have avoided UPS's, and gotten a "real" surge protector. The "shockwave" from that high-amperage short is far more likely to have done the damage than the mere loss of power. And the output of cheap UPS's is often far worse than the input.
[Edit: And good surge protection is never a feature of cheap UPS's.]
> However, in December 2023 a fault with our electric oven popped the breaker for the sockets causing everything to be harshly powered off. My fileserver took it badly and one drive died. That wasn’t a huge issue as it has a redundant filesystem, but I didn’t like it.
> I decided I could afford to treat myself to a relatively cheap UPS.
Just from that, I'd say he for-sure should have avoided UPS's, and gotten a "real" surge protector. The "shockwave" from that high-amperage short is far more likely to have done the damage than the mere loss of power. And the output of cheap UPS's is often far worse than the input.
[Edit: And good surge protection is never a feature of cheap UPS's.]