I live in an area where we have frequent, unannounced brownouts. They can range from a few minutes to a few hours and there's no way to tell which is which until after the fact. The most frustrating part about not having electricity for more than a few minutes is that I no longer have an Internet connection for obvious reasons.

I had already planned to buy a diesel-powered backup generator for the house, and that plan still stands, but I've now added a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) to my backup plans, way ahead of anything else.

Affordable Power Supplies

I have found a couple of places in Olongapo City where I can buy a UPS and I consider the prices affordable. They're not APC products, but they'll suffice if I can't find anything made by APC.

The prices range from 5000 to 10,000 pesos (or somewhere between $100 and $250 US dollars) depending on how much power I want for the backup power supply. Since I only plan to power a DSL modem and a netbook, I should be well off with the cheaper models.

Netbook Batteries and UPS Batteries

I've read in various places that a netbook battery can last anywhere from 3 to 6 hours depending on how you use the netbook (what applications you're running). Since I would only be using a web browser and a spreadsheet during that time (for my online business), I'm sure the netbook battery would last at least 3 hours. That is, provided I don't end up with a netbook that has one of those super cheap laptop batteries in it. I certainly hope not.

My plan is to have only the DSL modem and the desktop computer attached to the UPS. When a brownout occurs, I can properly shut down the desktop computer, move the Ethernet cable from the desktop to the netbook and plug the netbook into the UPS. When the UPS battery starts getting low, I can unplug the netbook from the UPS and continue until the netbook battery is near-dead.

Total Power Supply Backup Time

Based on my past experiences with UPS units and notebook computers, I'm making a conservative estimate that I would probably have at least 9 hours of backup power time using the netbook/UPS combination. The reality, considering breaks and other reasons not to be using a computer at all, is that it would probably be more than 12 hours. That just happens to be the average long brown out here due to being a scheduled brownout that I never get told about.

Plans change and I may end up doing something slightly different, or include other things in the backup plan, but that's where it stands right now.

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