"I live in a place where blackouts are very infrequent (perhaps a couple per year)" I live in a fairly rural place (Somerset, UK) In this particular part of t

"I live in a place where blackouts are very infrequent (perhaps a couple per year)" I live in a fairly rural place (Somerset, UK) In this particular part of the county, outages are approaching "per demi-decade". A recent boiler room explosion in a BT phone exchange caused my office to lose power for about 10 hours but my home, which is about a mile away, was fine. I kept the genny topped up at regular intervals. The many but small UPSs we use keep things running for the 10-20s that the genny needs to fire up and settle. At home I have several small UPSs to keep things running for about 45-60 minutes. The esxi (Dell T320) in the attic gets shutdown after five mins so that everything else up there gets more time. Anyway, its all about risk assessment, monitoring and understanding your gear. A Back-UPS is not the same as a Smart-UPS - output waveform and response to load etc. Also, your UPS should be self testing every two weeks. I have several APC Smart UPS 1500VA and others. The 1500 jobbies are something like 15 years old but on their third set of batteries at least. When apcupsd whines that they are getting on a bit we buy new batteries and swap them in on-line. My golden rule of thumb is do not buy a battery from a firm that you do not recognise. Do not skimp and save pennies over something that can explode or simply be rubbish.