I'm pretty sure I'm going to buy the "Belkin Surge Protection 600VA UPS Battery Backup", but I'm not sure if I'm wasting money and should get the 400VA*, or if maybe I'm being cheap and should pay twice as much for the 800VA that has Automatic Voltage Regulation.
*Ideally it would be for one PC, LED monitor (max 40W?), and an external drive rarely running (max 3W?).--component calculators estimating Watts for the PC vary around 180-220, does that sound right?
I've had a good handful of black or brown outs this year, so I don't know if it's just street-wide power cuts, or also some post-earthquake fluctuations in voltage (should fluctuations ever be so major that a PC reboots itself, rather than just switching off and staying off, or is that just a very very brief total power cut?)
should I look to buy a little device to measure watts and voltage consistency before choosing a UPS? is there any you'd recommend? (I don't remember much about electricity from high school, can pretty much any of these little powermeter devices tell me what I need to know to figure out how many watts a few devices are using?)
any advice appreciated.