Emergency Power Backup
Or Take A Break

Evaluate your particular home based small business situation. Some form of emergency power backup may be advisable if your type of business operations cannot tolerate a sudden power failure, or excessive fluctuations.

Backups of all kinds are essential to maintain continuity of some business operations. We have already seen, elsewhere on this site, how to plan to recover from a loss of business data .

Power backup measures are an integral part of the business resumption plan .

At A Loss Without Power?

Think about the negative impact(s) the following electrical power disturbances might have on your business operations:

• Sudden power failure.
• Rapid on/off power fluctuations.
• Fluctuations of voltage above (over voltage) and below (brownouts) nominal power line voltage.
• Instantaneous surge of high voltage, called "spikes". These often occur during thunderstorm activity.
• Excessive phase shifts.

Basic Prevention

One of the first, and too often overlooked, preventive measure to take is to have your electrical ground system checked by a competent master electrician. A faulty house ground is often the cause of trouble.

Obviously, you should shutdown and disconnect any unprotected electronic equipment:

• during thunderstorm activity,
• and at the first sign of power fluctuations.

An uninterruptible power supply (UPS or apc battery backup) can offer appropriate protection, as well as an emergency power backup for your computer and other sensitive electronic equipment.

A UPS will let you safely continue using your computer during power line disturbances. High quality UPS are designed to filter out many types of potentially damaging power disturbances. It will also continue to supply emergency power during a power line failure for a limited period of time.

Some high voltage spikes or phase shifts may damage, or even destroy your UPS emergency power backup. But, your electronic equipment will have been protected. My UPS went up in smoke during a thunderstorm last summer, after ten years of loyal service! It had done its duty. Both my computers were saved.

Personal Safety

Power line disturbances can be dangerous or have a negative impact on your personal safety. For example, some electromechanical shop equipment can cause serious injury, even death, if suddenly without power while you are operating them.

Disaster never seems to strike the disaster prepared.

Operational Protection

If your business operations must continue without significant interruption during business hours or longer, then you may have to consider using a power generator as a form of emergency power backup for the critical portions of your business operations.

In that case, make sure to evaluate carefully:

• the level of average continuous power (in KW) you will require during an emergency,
• and the maximum power surge your critical operations are likely impose upon your generator.

Hire the services of a competent electrician to help you with this evaluation, if need be. To be on the safe side, you should choose a generator with continuous and surge power ratings at least 20% to 30% above your maximum estimates.

Computer backup batteries

If you plan to rely heavily on a laptop to continue operating your business during an emergency power backup situation, you might consider keeping an extra, fully charged laptop battery pack on hand.

Stay tuned!

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