Crappy Power

I've had some problems in the somewhat recent past where my UPS goes into panic mode and because the battery was old / crappy, this made things "very bad". I've had no issues since replacing the battery, but now I'm getting a picture of why it was so awful from apcupsd:

Mon Aug 31 11:13:36 PDT 2009  Power is back. UPS running on mains.
Mon Aug 31 11:13:34 PDT 2009  Power failure.
Thu Aug 27 11:20:20 PDT 2009  Power is back. UPS running on mains.
Thu Aug 27 11:20:18 PDT 2009  Power failure.
Sat Aug 22 16:59:32 PDT 2009  Power is back. UPS running on mains.
Sat Aug 22 16:59:29 PDT 2009  Power failure.
Sat Aug 22 16:56:29 PDT 2009  Power is back. UPS running on mains.
Sat Aug 22 16:56:27 PDT 2009  Power failure.
Fri Aug 21 00:12:33 PDT 2009  Power is back. UPS running on mains.
Fri Aug 21 00:12:31 PDT 2009  Power failure.
Fri Aug 21 00:11:52 PDT 2009  Power is back. UPS running on mains.
Fri Aug 21 00:11:50 PDT 2009  Power failure.
... etc

There are a lot of power events going on. Given that the time of the "power failure" is always 2 seconds, my guess is that this just means power is fluctuating. I've lived in places where this happened a bit and where it happened not at all, but this is the worst I've seen.

The only thing I can say is: get a UPS if you don't have one! You may not need battery backup per se, but this is the kind of stuff that will send the power supply unit in your PC to an early grave. And if you're unlucky, the PSU may just take other components of your PC with it.

- Archangel