[conspire] Voltage Regulator WAS: new computer?I

[paulz at ieee.org]

 Thank you again for all of the helpful comments.  I'm going address different topics separately.  

Over the years, I have had a few situations when power was shutdown or lost.  Linux system always restarted.  Windows would complain at start up.  Typically the biggest issue was with OpenOffice / LibreOffice.  In my experience it recovered any files that were open, but may a few minutes of the last changes were lost.
Some years ago, I bought an AC voltage stabilizer.  Totally passive based on special resonant transformer. Outputs clean AC waveform despite variations of the input voltage or waveform.  It's as big as a desktop computer and very heavy.  For that reason, I never put it by my desk.   8 or 10 years back PG&E had an incident that sent a high voltage spike followed by a black out for half an hour.  Eventually they contributed to the replacement computer.  Come to think of it, one of my IDE drives was a survivor of that incident.

    On Thursday, November 22, 2018, 1:44:56 AM PST, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:  
 
 Quoting Ivan Sergio Borgonovo (mail at webthatworks.it):

[snip a lot]
 
> And a new UPS.

Rick's rant #327:

Why not a voltage regulator?

Buying a UPS puts about 70% of your purchase money into a huge lead-acid
battery that you'll need to replace about every five-six years, and 
all it gets you is ability to bridge continuous operation across
relatively small power outages.  Plus, with the right integration
software for your OS, you can get orderly shutdowns when the battery is
about to run out of power.  Plus, there's a bit of voltage regulation
circuitry, but typically not as good as the circuitry in a dedicated
voltage regulator box.

So, wow, the battery's because... we don't yet have journaled
filesytems?  I don't know about you, but for the past 15+ years, my
Linux systems have all had journaling, which means that when the power
goes down, sure, the system goes down, but when power's restored the
system comes back up undamaged.

Given that my systems have journaling, the threat model of concern isn't
so much blackouts as brownouts -- periods of low voltage and voltage
swings.  

Which is what an outboard voltage regulator protects against.

People keep telling me I ought to have a big honkn' lead-acid battery,
i.e., a UPS, but they never seem to be able to tell me  _why_ I should
want that.  The cynic in me suspect this is because they really haven't
thought things through, and haven't considered perhaps that voltage
regulation without the big honkn' lead-acid battery might be what's
actually wanted.


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