Lost power today. My toddler wanted toast during the outage so I figured I could make her some via the UPS. It made it all of 10 seconds before it was completely dead.
Edit: I turned it off immediately after we lost power so it was at about 95% capacity. This also isn’t your average workstation, it’s got a threadripper and a 4080 in it. That being said it wasn’t doing anything intensive.
It’s also a monster UPS.
Edit2: its not a TI obviously. I’ve lost my mind attempting to reason with a 2 year old about why she got no toast for hours.
In: 2145
Toasters draw a HUGE amount of power. The average toaster oven pulls 1,200 to 1,500 watts.
The average computer pulls around 50 watts and an energy efficient monitor will pull about 70 watts.
Batteries like those in the UPS are rated in Amp-hours, meaning the ability to deliver X amount of Amps for an hour of operation.
If the UPS is rated for 1 amp hour, it can provide 1 amp for an hour, or .5 an amps for 2 hours, or 2 amps for 1/2 an hour and so on.
The average toaster uses 8-10 amps, while a computer uses anywhere from 1/2 an amp to 5 amps depending on what you are doing. So a toaster will empty a UPS far more quickly than a computer. So if a UPS can run a computer for 30 minutes, it can probably only run a toaster for less than 5 minutes.
In your case there’s a pretty good chance you had already drained it a significant amount as well from using it with your computer.
Producing heat for the sake of producing heat is very energy intensive and to heat up toast a toaster must draw a lot of power to heat up very quickly.
The catch is over an hour of normal operation a computer will use a lot more electricity, because a toaster will only run for a couple of minutes while the PC runs continually.
Printers are also notorious for burning through a UPS because a laser printer is basically a big heater.
How long had the UPS already been on? Thirty minutes for a workstation seems like a REALLY long time.
Also, toasters use up A LOT of power… literally “burning it” for heat. It pretty much uses as much power for its entire usage as your computer does, just starting up when “everything” is turned in and using maximum power.
Depending on the toaster it uses around 1000 watts. Pc workstation with 4 monitors could use half that. An for why it cut out in about 10 seconds. That’s probably because the toaster. tried to draw more than the ups could output. So to protect itself and what’s connected. The ups would shut down.
One of the most power intensive things to use electricity for is making things hot.
Anyone who has lived somewhere with electric baseboard heaters as their primary heat source can tell you that. Your toaster draws significantly more power than your workstation. Like, 20x more.
The average Toaster uses 1100 watts. The average Monitor uses 84 watts and a PC uses about 100 watts, at max power about 350 vs 1100 for a basic toaster, more if it’s a bigger 4 slice.
Here is a short video showing how an Olympic cyclist compares to a toaster. Pretty telling how much power they need to function.
A toaster pulls a lot more power, even a high power gaming PC pulls about a third of the power of an average toaster
Devices that are designed to generate heat from elelctricity (eletric kettle, toaster, coffee machine, space heater, dishwasher, washing machine, etc) will be designed to basically draw the maximum amount of electricity that they are physically and/or legally able to when they try to generate heat.
That electrical energy is all needed to generate that heat, so the more power it uses, the faster it can heat it up, and the less time and energy is wasted.
Your toaster is ‘just’ a toaster, but its simplicity doesn’t make it use less power to heat up.
UPS are not really designed to be used like that. They’re for making sure sensitive electronics don’t suffer random surges or power drops from the outlet, and giving you enough time to properly save your work and shut down your pc/laptop etc.
Also, modern computers sip power unless your actively gaming on them. Toasters need massive power in comparison
Latest Answers