The weather turns up here soon, and with it come the two things that kill home network gear: surges and flickers. We've written about how we build redundancy into our own network—solar, batteries, generators, failover paths. This one is about the twenty feet of it that lives in your house.
A Power Strip Is Not a Surge Protector
Plenty of what gets sold as a power strip is just a row of outlets with a breaker. A real surge protector is rated in joules and says so on the box. Higher is better; anything under a few hundred joules is decoration.
They also wear out. Every surge a protector absorbs uses up a little of it, silently, until one day it's passing everything straight through. If yours has been behind the TV since the Obama administration, replace it. Many have an indicator light that tells you the protection is still alive—worth glancing at.
Flickers Are Worse Than Outages
A clean outage just turns things off. A brownout—lights dimming, power cycling three times in ten seconds—makes your equipment boot, half-boot, and boot again while the voltage sags. That's how power supplies die, and it's how a router that had worked for years suddenly won't come back up.
Think of it like a truck on a washboard road. It isn't the one big pothole that finishes the suspension; it's the thousand little ones.
Sizing a Battery Backup
Good news: your router and radio draw almost nothing. A typical home setup is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to 40 watts total, which is less than a light bulb. Even a small UPS will carry it for an hour or two, and that covers the vast majority of what an autumn storm throws at you.
A UPS does two jobs, and the second one matters more than people expect: it rides through flickers so your gear never notices, and it filters the ugly voltage that comes with them. If you want longer runtime than a desk-sized UPS gives you, a portable power station will run the same load through most of a day.
Whatever you use, put the router, the power injector for your radio, and nothing else on the battery outlets. A space heater on a UPS is just an expensive way to drain it.
The takeaway: check the date on your surge protector, get your router onto a battery, and label the cables while you're back there so you know what's what next time the lights blink.