So how many of you out there have a nice big widescreen LCD TV? With a DVR, DVD, or Blu-Ray player? With an XBox 360, or a Playstation 3, or a Wii? With surround sound?

And how much did you spend on all of that shiny hardware?

And how much would it suck if just suddenly one day “ZAP!” a power surge kills them all?

Uh huh. It’d suck.

So how many of you then have your goodies plugged straight in to this?

But the circuit breaker will surely protect your investments in entertainment … right?

Wrong!

The circuit breaker protects your house from fire. It won’t save your life. And it certainly won’t save the life of your toys.

Now some of you are no doubt feeling smug. Because you know that you have your toys plugged in to one of these:

Well, okay. That might do. Or it might not. It’s still designed around the same concept, to cut power as soon as something surges. But will it catch it in time? That’s debatable. Mainly debatable because there have been plenty of incidents that have gone each way. Which, for your shiny shiny is not great odds.

In fact, your odds with a surge protector are pretty much about as good as your odds with a related device, a ground fault circuit interrupt outlet like this:

The GFCI is a little bit more sensitive than a circuit breaker. It works fast. Fast enough to save your life. Possibly fast enough to save your electronics. It’s why kitchens and bathrooms have them. Have you ever thought of installing one for your TV? Well, no. Of course not. Because we have surge protectors.

But, okay, still … these are systems that at best respond to a major catastrophe. There’s still something far better. Welcome to the wonderful world of:

The UPS

-aka-

The Uninterruptible Power Supply

What is it? It’s a surge protector like device, but far better. It carries internal batteries that kick in whenever there’s a power loss. And if you buy a top-notch design you can even get one with AVR (Automatic Voltage Regulation), which is to say that it has electronics that actually smooth out any tiny surges in the voltage, raising or lowering them to exactly the right voltage so that your electronics never have to suffer or strain with an imperfect power line.

Not only is a UPS the best tool you can buy to protect your investment, but it’s also great to have for people who suffer brown-outs. You know, those little temporary blips of power outages that are over so quickly it only caused your lights to dim for a moment … but also caused all of your clocks to reset and goodness knows what else? Yeah, those. Any electronics on a UPS when one of those hits won’t even know anything happened.

In fact, if the power goes, the batteries in these can give you minutes of juice to tide you over or let you finish what you were doing and turn everything off safely.

When push comes to “ZAP!“, which would you rather have your toys plugged in to? You’ve already spent how much on them? What’s another fifty to make sure you don’t lose them?

And they’re great for computers too!