APC BR1500LCD 1500VA 865 Watts 8 Outlets BACK-UPS

Battery with data [Posted on 2008-09-15]
After a couple of earlier incarnations of UPS backup products and a bit of scouting, I selected the APC RS1500LCD 1500VA unit for my home office computer. (Thanks to other Amazon reviewers for steering me to precisely the right model; there are many similar offerings from APC). I was not particularly impressed with earlier versions of APC's Power Chute software and didn't install it this time. After plugging in both of my Dell towers into this unit, the readout tells me exactly how much power I'm drawing. Which brings me to the truly outstanding feature of this battery backup: a data readout. You can scroll through the screens and see various data, but the most useful for me is how much power I'm using and when the last power failure was, not to mention the quality of the current you're using. I also like the cable surge protection.

So far, the power has gone out here in stormy Florida a couple of times since I've had the APC 1500, and the unit handled it flawlessly. I have a home generator system, and the APC is perfect for keeping my computers, router, and cable modem up and running while the generator fires up and supplies auxiliary power. It also works great for the power flickers we get here sometimes.

My one slight complaint is that there is not much room to plug in too many of those annoying power blocks that so many peripherals use. I bought a heavy gauge 3 foot extension cord to address the plug space issue.

Reliable backup with surge protection and a data screen that lets you know what is going on. I highly recommend this incarnation from APC.

Good UPS [Posted on 2008-09-20]
We bought this item as power backup and to noise filter the line for a large screen LCD TV. We live in Northern New Mexico, second only to Florida to lightning. It worked out of the box and was easy to use. We have lost power twice with it on line and it worked well.

Does what it was designed to do. [Posted on 2008-09-20]
I purchased this to prevent data loss during brown-outs and power outages when I'm here using the computer. I tried the system shut-down software, but it hogs huge amounts of CPU time for no reason. There's no way you can game with the system monitor running because it causes long pauses due to heavy CPU usage. I don't need the auto shut-down anyway. Aside from this, the unit does what it says it does.

Great unit [Posted on 2008-10-01]
Seems to be a pretty solid unit. It has logged 26 "events" in the few weeks since I've had it. I'm not sure all of these were significant enough to interrupt my PC operation, but some of them were.

I think I overbought. I have a MacPro with 3 external hard drives, a Neat Receipts scanner, and two MFC devices hooked up (one laser, one inkjet). It only requires 22% of the power (with both printers in energy saver mode). The software to shutdown is Mac OS X 10.5.5 compatible and seems to work o.k. I haven't pulled the power and waited to see if it would power off the machine in an orderly way, but I assume it works. I will test it some time.

The unit says 24 minutes of run time available if I lost power. Given I'm only using 22% of capacity, this is disappointing; however, practically speaking, this is fine. I mainly wanted to avoid damage, and avoid going down for those constant "blips" that make me reset a bunch of clocks in the house when the power loss lasts only a few seconds or less. And practically speaking, I just want time for an orderly shutdown if I am going to lose power for more than a few minutes.

I might buy a smaller unit if I had to do it over again, but I have no complaints about this unit.

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