UPS Surge Protector Review
By Donald Owens, Edison NJ
First off let me say that I love APC and I wanted to give them a really decent ups surge protector review, but we (my wife and I) bought the APC Surge Protector Battery Backup 325va 120v Lam and as far as UPS systems, there are better surge protectors out there. While APC produces outstanding equipment for surge protection, this particular unit falls short on many fronts. You want a UPS surge protector (the UPS stands for uninterruptible power supply) to carry enough backup battery power to allow you enough time to power down whatever equipment is attached to it. That’s the whole purpose of a UPS. While this unit offers affordable protection for a computer and claims to have enough juice in storage to protect your entire computer system, I have to say that that just isn’t the case.
There are some extraneous features that you don’t really need from a battery backup surge protector, too, like the built-in phone/fax/modem line, which by the way is DSL compatible. It’s a small device and it is a great buy for the price ($40), but the run time lasts less than a minute with all it’s outlets being used, but about 8 minutes with half of them. For a battery backup UPS device, though it should have more Joules protection. 320 Joules for a UPS with surge protector just seems very low. Especially given that it allows you to plug in routers or modems which are easily damaged by line noise. I expect that with one good surge, you will be replacing this model. Fortunately I still have mine, but it’s being used on the children’s computer in their playroom.
It’s a fairly small unit considering it’s a battery back up surge protector. Perfect for my kids Mac but I need something bigger for my home office. When we set out to buy a UPS we were set on choosing an APC surge protector. I have several around the house for other appliances so we knew we could count on the brand. But after using this particular model, I wish we’d gone another route. It’s not the 3 battery backup outlets that most people have found complaints with the item, it’s small after all; it’s the lack of wattage power. It’s something you should by for traveling or to use like we did and put our two boys’ PC on it. As for the three outlets, you only really need three if you have a basic CPU, monitor and printer set up and for us that was perfect.
It’s almost too small an application for a home office though in my opinion. We tested it and cut the power to the room one day and the unit beeped, alerting us that we needed to power down everything, so that was nice. All in all if you don’t do lots of work on your computer, then the APC Surge Protector Battery Backup 325va 120v Lam may suffice. For my wife and I, however, we needed something bigger.
