| Theres a few more types than that. But thats the gist of it. "online" is generally a double conversion UPS. These are generally the best for clean power to the electronics. Since its always supplied by the battery. Its also often one of the hardest on the battery. Line-interactive are probably most common. They are pretty solid, but since there is a delay for the cutover, surges and really dirty spikes can make it through to the equipment. So say a lightning strike or REALLY bad surge on an overloaded generator can get through, whereas on a Double conversion it may just trip the fuse or breaker. Also running a whole home or standby generator on these line interactive can make them trip constantly since the generators often dont A) run at 60Hz (ie: mine runs closer to 63Hz) B) run with a pure sine wave You can get inverter generators to help with this. But thats a cost too. And otherwise the solution is to "de-tune" the UPS sensitivity. I de-tune this on mine. Its been fine, running on gennys during the rainy months for hours and every know and then...days at a time. I have had to swap out power supplies more often..But even then, usually thats after like...5+ years of runtime. |