I can play Wii during a power outage …

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… for about 10 minutes anyway.

Last night I tested my new APC J15 home theater power conditioner and UPS. A neat feature of the unit is the front VFD that shows various informational screens, one of which is the total watts being drawn. With everything connected turned on (receiver, DVD player, TiVo, Wii, and plasma display), I’m pulling between 560 and 570 watts:


Which according to a different screen on the display gives me roughly 7 minutes of battery run time (again, with everything running). “Normal” usage (one component and the TV) is about 340 watts, most of which is the plasma. I ran the calibration test (which puts the unit into battery mode until the power runs out) and confirmed everything was able to run off of battery. Pretty cool.

Ok, so I’m not really going to be watching TV (or playing Wii) during an extended power-outage, but at least my equipment is protected from the occasional brown-out or surge.

I did find an irritating bug in the firmware of the J15 during my testing. There are separate options in the setup to control the brightness of the status LEDs and the VFD. Each of those options has either High, Low, and Off. Since the unit is in a closed cabinet, I don’t really need either one on, so I tried setting both to Off. What I discovered though is that when both are set to Off, the display will blank (no text) but the backlight will not turn off. So the status LEDs are off, the display is blank, but it’s a big glowing blue rectangle. If I leave the status LEDs on Low and set the display to Off, the display properly turns off after a few seconds of inactivity. Also, you can’t turn off the circular blue light around the power button which shows you the unit is on. Again, nothing earth-shattering especially since my equipment is all behind the doors of a cabinet, but in a normal family room setting those blue LEDs could be annoying. I’ve used small pieces of electrical tape in the past to cover up those annoying “standby” LEDs on other equipment, but it’d be hard to nicely cover up that circular glow.

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