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Actually none of these quite compare to a telephone central office, where the battery bank is absolutely huge, and all the essential stuff runs off the batteries which are constantly kept charged. A properly equipped telephone CO can run for two days on just the battery.

When I was a kid, growing up in a rural area with a telephone engineer for a father, we had a similar battery bank in our basement, it took up an entire room. The lead acid batteries had to be routined and their specific gravity and charge levels checked on a weekly basis, which I learned to do when I was about eight. You should have seen me in the rubber apron and gloves, not to mention the safety goggles.

Ours was NOT a true UPS, though, because it used an armstrong switching method - when the power went off, someone went down to the basement and threw the big switch, with a small baseball bat size handle, and the lights came back on. Ours would be the only house lit up for miles around, and we got lots of visitors on cold winter nights.

dicion wrote:*Looks at the 1500VA he has his DSL modem and related networking equipment plugged into...

... I still had internet access 3 days after Ike because of that thing! Sure, I had to use my laptop, but still!

I don't do anything small, for me, it's go big, or go home

I look at the three different UPS I have in my house and wonder how you could live with anything as small as 350VA, I've been considering a couple of upgrades.

Not to mention my backup UPS, charged regularly but on standby.