Had a scare last night!
 

Had a friend and his girlfriend over last night. We worked on my bar, then I cooked some steaks.

Right in the middle of dinner we had a pretty large power surge. Lights went really bright, then back to normally. That really never happened before. Then just a minute or two later, did it again, only this time the power did not go back down! For about 20 seconds it was super bright, then power completely out. I walked outside and the electrical company was down the street! So evidently something was wrong. Power came back on, then a large surge AGAIN and power out. Finally after about 10 minutes, power back on and all normal. We don't have rolling black outs or issues with power. This is very unusual for us.

We go back to the media room to watch SNL and just talk, hang out and I got NOTHING! Only thing that I have power to is my X1 (which is ironic since I'm half looking to upgrade it). I unplugged everything and let sit a minute then plugged in. My H/K powered up, but nothing else! So I left everything unplugged for about 30 minutes, then plugged it all back in and went to bed. This morning all was fine! WOW...I'm always looking to upgrade, but would have hated to do everything all at once! Makes me think about review my surge protectors as I'm really just using cheap power strips.

But luckily...all ok this time....

Sounds like you had a visit from a laughing little girl. "There is nothing more...dangerous than a human child."

I just had some sort of brownout the other night, not as bad. Somehow my week-old PJ and computer stayed up and running even though the receiver reset. I was a little worried, too. Haven't seemed to have any problem.

Surge protectors aren't all that useful electrically speaking. As you've discovered, the equipment is supposed to handle surges all by itself. But an extra layer of protection can be nice. I figure, I need a strip of some sort, might as well have some protection, too.

Well still all ok with my media room, but now having trouble with the internet. SBC talked me thru getting on with a single computer, but wonder if it screwed my router. Odd cause all this happened Saturday night and Sunday computer fine. But Sunday afternoon no net. SBC walked me thru and got net for a single computer directly into the modem, but now can't seem to re-hook up my router. Which is a bummer as my tivo is wireless to my router.

I'm going to call them SBC again and see if they will walk me thru hooking up my router, I seem to recall something odd about my particular modem when used with a router.

IMHO UPSs are cheap enough that there's really no reason not to have them protecting all the high $ electronics in the home.

You should be careful, though. The cheap UPSs are not necessarily putting out the right kind of power for some equipment. Esp for the amps and TV. I forget the details, but it was enough to make me stay away for now, mostly because of my projector. Besides, I don't really need battery backup.

Well got lucky on the router as well. Called SBC, seems the power surge just reset my modem knocking it out of "bridge" mode. So set that and all working again.

I was kind of hoping it would have blown up my X1 or at least the bulb. Ah well...maybe next time.

That's why I bought one of the higher end ones for my theater setup ;) Power is so flaky around here personally I feel better having it around but that's just me.

It's not just you! All of my stuff has been on a UPS for years and I wouldn't have it any other way. It's not so much for the battery backup (although that's nice with the Tivo and the like) but for the surge and spike protection. When you've spent, in some cases, thousands of dollars on HT equipment, the extra $200 for a big fat 1500VA UPS is money well spent, IMO.

I've been reading threads at AVS where people report problems running their projectors off a UPS. Maybe it's dependent on how good the UPS puts out something approximating a sine wave but you would think that only comes into play when it's running off batteries.

Happened to me. The UPS would short out the projector and put it into a bulb failure mode. Im actually getting a replacement projector from Optoma due to DVI now not working and i get some flakiness in whites at times ever since i put it on the UPS.

That's what nemein and I were discussing briefly above. You can't use a cheap UPS for a projector. And it isn't powerful enough to handle decent amps, either. The cutoff used to magically be $500 from every UPS company, but I'm sure that has varied in the last year since I looked at this.

You guys who bought a UPS for protection, I hope you got it. Because protection is not a main feature of UPSs. They are battery backup first (for computer systems, really), protection has only really been added to them with the advent of "HT" models. Originally, they had zero protection other than what is built into normal power supplies, so people would put a surge protector in there, too. I always see much confusion on this issue.