You’ve invested a ton of time and money into your homelab. Still, you leave them exposed to power outages, surges, and voltage dropouts—it’s Prime Day, treat yourself with an uninterruptible power supply while they’re still on sale.
APC 1500VA Uninterruptible Power Supply
Save $53 on APC’s 1500VA UPS during Prime Day. It can keep your homelab online for between 15 and 30 minutes during power outages and offers UPS-to-PC connectivity, meaning that it can automatically shut down your servers during long outages.
What’s an Uninterruptible Power Supply?
Anuninterruptible power supply(UPS) is essentially just a surge protector with an integrated battery. If your power goes out, any device that’s connected to your UPS—be it a NAS, mini PC, or router—will stay online for the duration of the UPS' battery life. This saves you the trouble of turning your homelab back on after an outage, and more importantly, it protects your devices against sudden outages or voltage drops that can harm sensitive components or corrupt data.
Some mid-range and high-end uninterruptible power supplies can even communicate with your server via USB. So, not only will your homelab be protected during short power outages, but it can automatically shut down when the UPS begins running low on battery.
Of course, UPS capacity is largely determined by price. You can geta cheap unitfor $55, but it’ll be rated for roughly 400VA-600VA, which is only enough juice for about 5 to 10 minutes of operation in a typical homelab environment. Options inthe $100+ rangetend to be rated at least 1500VA, which’ll give you about 15 to 30 minutes of operation. Plus, the higher price is usually accompanied by extra outlets, user-replaceable batteries, network and coaxial protection, USB UPS-to-PC communication, and other perks.
I should also take this moment to clarify that power outages won’t always impact your cable or fiber internet service. If you keep your router and modem connected to a UPS, you may be able to connect to the internet during some outages.
Anyways, You Should Buy This UPS While It’s on Sale
I’ve seen a mess of sporadic UPS deals this Prime Day, with some units falling as low as $37. ButAPC’s 1500VA UPSis the best deal that I can find right now. Usually sold for $190, this UPS is currently on sale for just $137—a neat $53 discount. I’m actually buying it myself, as I need to replace a crummy old UPS that I picked up at a thrift store some years ago.
The APC 1500VA UPS offers all the functionality that I talked about earlier in this article. It should last up to half an hour when connected to a NAS, mini PC, and router, it has a USB port that can trigger a a server’s shutdown process during long blackouts, and the internal batteries are user-replaceable.
APC also provides a 3-year warranty for this UPS. The warranty, coupled with the replaceable batteries, make this a particularly good long-term purchase.
I don’t expect this deal to last long, so get on it now if you’re interested. Alternatively, you’re able to check out someother uninterruptible power supplies on Amazonand track down a discounted unit that offers whatever battery capacity and functionality you care about.
