Backup Power The Easy Way - Your UPS

I don't know about you, but we've been losing utility power pretty frequently here in California. Sometimes a few minutes or an hour, but more and more it's been out for 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours. And this isn't just little backwoods burbs, either, this is happening in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other major cities. What the hell is wrong with PGE is a subject for its own website at this point - for now, let's make sure you have at least a little bit of back up power available.

OKAY, so boof, out goes the power at your house. Hopefully you have flashlights and candles and the like handy, but what about the computer? "WHAT ABOUT THE INTERNET??" is more to the point. I'll be back soon with plenty of details on how you can keep this essential of essentials up and running during the blackout, so you won't have to resort to playing cards or having hand-shadow puppet shows with that flashlight of yours.

We decided on the APC Back-UPS RS 1500, which is good up to 865 watts. This guy has a nice interface to your PC as well, so you can monitor how much battery time you have left, plus get reports on last outages, etc. PLUS plus, it's expandable, so you can hook a secondary battery on it, which adds about 60% more battery power / lights / internet / toast / whatever time to your outage adventure. Highly recommended - feel free to email us with any questions about this or other UPSs you're thinking about.