My BX750MI-GR has saved my precious data on two occasions. Earlier this year, my seven year old, well used waffle iron shorted, popping loudly and sparking quite brightly in the process, probably because of all the gunk that had accumulated inside its less cleanable interior over the years. That not only made my breaker trip, but also blew the 16 amp main fuse. The UPS kicked in immediately, making a klick and a beep, which felt amazing. That was my first time ever.
As for the second time, see this post.
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.
Oh, do tell what happened that day?
Replied below :)
Don’t be a tease. Type out the story!
Okeydoke.
Walk in to my office one day, see the shop lights flickering. Not flashing- pulsing, like someone’s playing with a light switch as fast as they possibly can. “Uhoh, that can’t be good.” During the afternoon, lights flickered repeatedly over and over, in a kind of pulse- like half the waveform disappeared, over and over every maybe 15 minutes or so. I’m no electrician but I think a transformer down the road was in the process of exploding, dropping out a phase maybe?
Each time, our big APC unit with 8x addon battery packs slaved to it- (About 15U worth of rackmount battery packs) the relays cutting to battery and back to AC cycled so fast each time, a professional heavy metal drummer would have been impressed. Horrifying sound to be honest.
After this a handful of times, it happened again and this time, the APC spewed white sparks out the back of the main unit, about 4-5 feet, which meant it was blasting the plaster behind it with sparks bright enough to see them bounce off the wall and roll on the floor. I’ll be honest it looked like welding sparks and the back of the server rack looked like a fireworks show. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this expression before, but I was “shitting purple twinkies”. Full blown panic. Brain couldn’t even compute what I was seeing.
That was the day we lost about $6,000 worth of battery backup for my office’s server rack.
INB4 “But why didn’t you go to the manufacturer for help after?” I did. APC gave us a mind-melting great offer: gigantic discount for the replacement unit, shipped for free (these things come on pallets by the way) but my drooling idiot of a boss decided calling the insurance company and getting an incredible deal from APC for a direct replacement was “too much effort”. Instead he ordered some “normy” 1500’s. We went from ~ 10,000VA of battery backup down to 2,000. Used to be we could stay up/online for hours worth of outage. Now maybe 45 minutes.
At least they’re cheap to replace cells in. Urgh.
Edit: forgot to mention, it spared our gear, none of these insane power events reached their power supplies.