Since moving off my Airport Extreme to the Asus RT-N16, I’ve been concerned about the lack of backup power in the case of a power outage (my cable modem has a backup battery, but my router doesn’t). I’ve been looking fro a small UPS for some time now, but all I’ve ever found were the power strip style ones. Then, a few weeks back, I found a stack of these BGE70‘s at the local Goodwill (brand new), for $20 each. Knowing they wouldn’t sell fast, I decided to wait a until they fell to half price, and pick one up then.
4 weeks later, their color came around, and I picked one up for $10. Awesome. I brought it home, hooked up the negative battery terminal, and plugged it in. It powered right up, and seemed to work great. It does output a simple square wave (which doesn’t matter (much) to most digital gear, or their switching power supplies), and provides about 75W of capacity. I’m only loading it to about 15W, so I should get at least 100 minutes of uptime. =) The unit has two screw slots on the backside that allow wall mounting, which was easy to do where my cable modem and router are in the garage.
The unit doesn’t have grounded power outlets (nor is it’s input grounded), so it’s really meant for routers, cable modems, access points, etc. It’s not a computer UPS (though, I suppose you COULD use it for something like an LED backlit LCD TV).
My only complaint about the unit, and it’s minor, is the rather bright green LED on the power button. The unit is in the garage, so it doesn’t matter, but if I had my router and cable modem in my office still, I’d find the light overly bright. But, some tape or round white labels would fix that quickly.
Overall, very happy, and certainly worth the $10 (probably worth the $50 that they retail for, even).
[xrr rating=5/5]
