My SuperArtGirl and I won a shopping cart prize in the Time and Space Contest for our Rocket Cat Project.
I've been looking to get a battery backup for our fibre-modem and WiFi router, as we get the occasional power outage during the winter. When the main modem goes down, even the land-line phone stops working, and our cell coverage here is terrible. That's not great if we were to have an emergency.
Luckily, this prize gave us enough budget to get two nice battery backup units, that, if I calculated correctly, should keep things running for 4 to 5 hours during an outage.
This meant I was also able to move the smaller unit we already had covering the phone line (from a previous contest cart! yay!) to cover the septic lift-pump alarm - the tank should be big enough to handle anything but a full bathtub, but it's nice to know we'll have a warning if it gets too full. Unfortunately the pump draws too much start-up current for one of these units to handle, but generally the outages are not long enough to need the pump.
I put the bigger UPS on top of my modem cabinet, which covers the wired Internet and the phone line. I chose to not back up the other little boxes because the equipment they serve will not have power during an outage (smart-home things and desktop computers).
The other UPS is now on top of a kitchen cabinet where it serves what is normally the smart-home router. It made more sense to do this than to cover the main WiFi router, because it's out of the way, and I think this WiFi router is actually a fair bit more energy efficient.
I also picked up a couple of new colours for the 3D printer 
Poor SuperArtGirl - Newark/Farnell does not have many art supplies 
But she will benefit from the power backup units too, and she's the one who wanted the yellow printer filament.
Maybe one day I'll have the budget to put in a whole-home battery backup, but for now I think we have all the important things covered - thanks element14!
Top Comments