Is load shedding still happening in South Africa?

No. Eskom passed four hundred consecutive days without it during 2026, and its winter outlook that year projected none through August. Interruptions since have come from distribution faults, maintenance and theft rather than a generation shortfall, which makes them local and unannounced instead of scheduled nationally.

How long will a UPS run my gaming PC?

Minutes, not hours. A tower with a current graphics card can pull 400 watts or more under load, and consumer battery capacities are sized for a graceful shutdown rather than continued play. Read the runtime figure as time to save and close down, then back up the router separately if staying online through the outage is what you actually want.

Can I run a fridge or my lights off one of these?

No. Desk-side units are designed for computing loads on a standard wall socket, and motor-driven appliances draw a heavy surge at start-up that will trip them. Backing up a fridge, a geyser or a lighting circuit means a fixed installation wired by a qualified electrician, which is a different product and a different trade entirely.

What size unit do I need to keep only the fibre line alive?

Very little. An ONT and a router together typically draw 15 to 25 watts, so even a small unit or a dedicated mini battery box holds the connection up for hours. This is the cheapest genuinely useful backup most households can buy, because a working line means phones and laptops carry on functioning on their own batteries.

Does leaving a UPS permanently plugged in harm the battery?

Modern units manage charging and will not overcharge, but heat is what shortens battery life, so keep the unit ventilated and out of a sealed cabinet. Sealed lead-acid cells in home units generally need replacing every few years, and a unit that starts beeping early during a self-test is reporting that the battery rather than the electronics has reached its end.

Should I plug a laser printer into the battery sockets?

Never onto the battery-backed outlets. A laser printer's fuser draws a heavy intermittent current that can overload the unit and cut power to everything else attached to it. Use the surge-only sockets where the model provides them, and keep the battery outlets for the PC, the monitor and networking equipment.

How do I know when the battery needs replacing?

Run the self-test the unit provides and watch how quickly it reports a low battery against a known load. One that once held a load for fifteen minutes and now manages three has lost its capacity. Many models also raise a fault code or a continuous alarm once internal resistance climbs past a threshold, and replacement cells are usually a standard size rather than a proprietary part.

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Best Inverter for Load Shedding SA

UPS backup unit powering a desktop PC and a fibre router during an outage

Load Shedding Is Over. Outages Are Not.

South Africa passed four hundred consecutive days without load shedding during 2026, and Eskom's winter outlook that year projected none at all. What has not ended is the local interruption. City Power attributes around 60 percent of Johannesburg's outages to ageing distribution equipment, a further 20 percent to cable theft and vandalism, and the balance to external faults and overloaded networks, on top of scheduled maintenance shutdowns that take a suburb off supply for most of a working day. Summer storms remove feeders without notice. None of that is a national crisis, but it is still a machine losing power mid-save.

The honest scope of a desk-side unit is short, and that should shape what you size it for. A battery backup exists to carry equipment through a dip or a switchover and to buy enough time to save work and shut down cleanly, not to run a household through an afternoon. A gaming tower under load can draw several hundred watts and will empty a typical battery in minutes, while a fibre ONT and a router together sit around 15 to 25 watts and can stay alive for hours on the same pack. Keeping the line up is frequently the more useful goal.

Two specifications decide whether a unit does its job. The VA rating is not the wattage: many consumer models carry a power factor near 0.6 or 0.7, so a 1,000VA unit may deliver only 600 to 700 real watts. Output waveform is the other, because a modern PC power supply with active power factor correction can refuse to follow a stepped approximation of mains AC and shut the machine down at the exact moment the unit transfers to battery. Evetech lists these units from its Centurion warehouse, reaching the major centres in 1 to 3 business days and regional addresses in 3 to 5.

Sizing Backup Power for a Desk, Not a House

Decide what you are protecting before looking at a single product. The load you choose to back up sets the runtime, and runtime is the only figure that determines whether the purchase was worth making.

Divide the battery's usable watt-hours by the load in watts, then remove ten to fifteen percent for conversion losses. A pack holding 150Wh feeding a 15W router and ONT gives roughly eight hours; the same pack feeding a 400W desktop gives under twenty minutes. Runtime also falls faster than proportionally as load rises, so a unit that comfortably rides out an hour on a laptop may not manage ten minutes on a tower carrying a large graphics card.

Manufacturers lead with the VA figure because it is the bigger number. Real deliverable power is VA multiplied by the power factor, which sits near 0.6 to 0.7 on many consumer models and closer to 0.9 on better ones. Add up the actual draw of the equipment you intend to plug in, not the sticker rating of your power supply, then pick a unit whose watt figure clears that total with margin to spare.

Cheaper units output a stepped or simulated approximation of mains AC. Power supplies with active power factor correction, which covers essentially every quality PC unit sold today, can read the gap in that waveform as a fault and drop out during the transfer, sometimes preceded by an audible hum from the supply. Where a desktop is the load, a pure sine wave output removes the risk outright and is the specification to insist on.

A standby unit waits idle and switches across when mains fails. A line-interactive unit adds automatic voltage regulation, correcting sags and surges without touching the battery, which matters on a weak suburban feed and extends battery life considerably. An online double-conversion unit runs the load from its inverter permanently and transfers with no gap at all, at higher cost and with a standing efficiency penalty. Most home desks are well served by the middle option.

A backup unit keeps equipment running when supply stops. It does not automatically protect against what arrives down the line when supply returns. Restoration surges and lightning-induced transients cause real losses through a Highveld summer, and they reach equipment through the data cable as often as through the power lead. Check whether the model includes surge suppression, whether that suppression carries a joule rating, and whether it covers the network port as well as the socket.

Everything here assumes a desk-side unit protecting computing and networking equipment. Whole-property backup, solar arrays and fixed installation are a different trade governed by different regulations, and are not what these products do.

Sizing Backup Power for a Desk, Not a House

Load Shedding Is Over. Outages Are Not.

UPS and Inverter Backup for Power Outages (4)

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Elecstor ECO mini ELE-ECO1825 UPS

Elecstor-ECO TIT-ECO32700 Mini DC UPS

RCT 1000VA 600W Line Interactive UPS

Promate PowerTank-600 600W Portable

Sizing Backup Power for a Desk, Not a House

UPS and Inverter Backup for Power Outages (4)

Filters

Price Range

Elecstor ECO mini ELE-ECO1825 UPS

Elecstor-ECO TIT-ECO32700 Mini DC UPS

RCT 1000VA 600W Line Interactive UPS

Promate PowerTank-600 600W Portable

Sizing Backup Power for a Desk, Not a House