Be warned:
The recent strong winds in South Australia showed that the resulting power outages could severely impact those without the necessary precautions even outside the affected area. It is not just storms, I have had clients in a building with a faulty lift, electricity stopped.
No power and a modern retail shop stop.
Don’t worry. There’s a solution.
A UPS is what every retail business should invest. It will protect not just power outages; a decent UPS also stops brown-outs and most surges too (see explanation below for those that want the technical details)
The problem
In many ways, surges are the worst because they can physically destroy a computer system. I have seen a surge that was so big it caused a monitor to explode, and the damage from the flying glass was so significant that broke the front window, hurt severely one of the staff and thus closed the shop for a few days.
One point, I must stress, if you have a UPS, you need to check that it works regularly, that means every month, stop the power and see how it behaves. UPS often appear to work even when broken.
If you are interested in getting a UPS, here are some tips
Explanation of power terms
The main problems with power and computers, in my experience, are these. They can all be linked for example
Spikes generally happen when something like a lift engine breaks. What you get is a sudden increase in power. For a very short time, what you see is a dramatic increase in power. This can fry computer components. Then you get a Blackout when you get no power as everything gone down. But while the Blackout is happening the computer experiences a major drop in voltage. This is called a Brownout. What this does is create a short burst of voltage in the computer to compensate. This burst can ruin the computer instantly.
More information
There are many others problems which you can read up here.
