THIS IS THE BEST UPS I HAVE EVER OWNED

Author's Rating:

Pros: Super Software, long runtime, will handle large loads.

Cons: Shipping costs a bunch.. Its heavy (Sealed Lead Acid batteries)

The Bottom Line: 
Buy it! Same or more features of similar APC units at 2/3 the price.

Author's Review
This is the best UPS system I have ever owned.
I picked this unit up from Tiger Direct (www.tigerdirect.com) for a good price. I wanted an APC unit originally, but cost drove me toward the Belkin 1200 VA Model. I am impressed with the small size of this unit for its power handling ability. This unit can handle 700 Watts of power, and is MORE than sufficient for my 17” CRT Tower system and speakers. I ran all this off of my Belkin unit and only ran it up to 33% of capacity!

I own a small office APC unit, but ‘settled’ for the Belkin unit when I was looking to upgrade. I ‘settled’ for the Belkin over the APC unit due to cost. (It was about 2/3 of the APC price).

I got the unit out of the box and hooked it up, then I installed the software… and that was when I truly was sold on the Belkin model.

The Belkin UPS has AVR, which keeps it off batter power during a brownout situation.. and this is useful if you have local voltage drops due to A/c units or other power hungry machines… ok I will admit that newer APC units have AVR, but please read on.

The Bulldog protection software is the crowning achievement for this unit. Belkin could have slapped a USB cable into the box and told you how to setup Windows UPS services.. but Belkin spent some good money and created a true gem.

This software is more than just the older PowerChute software I am used to. PowerChute would do quite a lot, but Bulldog does that and more. Bulldog will do the normal shutdown routines, with messenger service to users, etc. However Bulldog also will send emails to you via its own mailer (don’t need outlook etc..) or it can send a text page if you wish. It also connects to your soundcard to verbally tell you that there was a power loss. I thought that was a nice touch. Thus I considered that Belkin unit took the basics and touched it up a bit to make it look pretty.

Further, I have a few small ‘dumb’ UPS systems that can’t communicate to their PC’s. I even installed the Bulldog software on these computers. Why you ask, would I put Belkin software on a dumb UPS computer”? That’s the gem. I did this because when I enable the belkin software on the ‘dumb’ computer as a ‘slave’ unit, my Belkin UPS will send out a network command to shutdown the ‘dumb’ machines. My current home setup will shut down the dumb UPS computers with a network command after 5 minutes without utility power. I additionally told my Master unit not to shutdown until it has low battery power. I find it nice that I can use the Belkin software to shutdown other computers independently of my master machine. ( This is also useful if you have two PC’s on one UPS, one of which needs to stay up.. Check out this example: You can shutdown your workstation early to save battery power to keep the server going.)

The software also allows you to monitor the status of the UPS: Battery power, load level, input and output voltages etc. This software also keeps a log file of each of these values for tracking. This was helpful because I can track line voltage and frequency over a month’s time using their software. It was nice for me to know that my utility line voltage fluctuates by 5V over the course of a week. [This could be useful to note AC power problems on the supply side and have a record if you need to call your utility people.]

I got more for my money than I thought I would. This doesn’t happen all that often. I am very impressed.