The front of the UPS has three lights; green means everything is fine, yellow indicates that the UPS is running on battery power. The indicator light will blink and beep when battery power is low, and finally turn red when the Belkin UPS is either out of power, or there is a fault. If there is a fault the UPS' alarm will go off for 10 seconds. The lone button on the front turns the UPS on, off and runs the 10 second test.

The rear of the Universal 1000VA UPS is organized into a couple sections, with areas for connection the unit to a computer, power distribution for UPS-backed up devices, and simply surge suppressed outlets.

There are a total of six standard 3-prong power outlets, but only the top four have battery-backup capability. The bottom two as we mentioned a moment ago, feature only surge protection. Since the powersupply is pretty compact, you'll not want to use any sort of AC-power adaptor here which may block an adjacent plug.

The Belkin Universal 1000VA UPS is also capable of filtering RJ11/RJ45 jacks (phone line/network cable) but unlike the Home Office 500VA model, the Universal 1000VA does offer any coaxial cable filtering. The USB and serial ports shown here to the left are for UPS monitoring if you connect the UPS to the computer but it's not required for the UPS to operate.

On the front of the UPS is a very useful tool called the "LED Site wiring fault indicator", if your home/office has bad wiring, or problems with grounding, that LED will shine a bright red.

Finally on the list of things worth mentioning is that the Belkin 1000VA UPS is equipped with a circuit breaker should there be a surge of power, if it pops simply push it to reset.

Warranties and Hardware Protection Guarantees

A quick way to find out what a manufacturer thinks about their products is by how long the warranty is. Belkin obviously has a lot of faith in the Universal 1000VA UPS, providing a three year warranty as well as a $300,000 connected equipment and data recovery warranty!

Talk to anyone who's had to get data professionally recovered and you'll hear about some horror stories for sure... Though if you are in a pinch, PCstats Hard Drive Data Recovery Guide as some really handy tips on this critical subject. If you choose to go the professional rough, I know locally there are some places that will recover 1GB of data for about $500 CDN. Even if you have a small HDD, recovering data can become very expensive, very quickly. Knowing that Belkin believes in their products so much certainly should give a potential buyers peace of mind!