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.