🚀 go-pugleaf

Here's a summary of the responses I got to the following question:
>    1. What are the power requirements of my Sun and its monochrome
>       screen?  (I know how much the Quantum drive draws)  It came
>       without docs, so I'm in the dark here.  Under 250W?  450W?  600W?
>    2. How sensitive is the Sun power supply to fluctuations in the
>       supply?  I can remember an office glitch in which two IBM RT's
>       went castors-up whilst a Sun3/60 never even blinked.  Are Sun's
>       generally good in this respect?
>    3. Is the extra expense of a UPS/SPS worth it?  In other words, how
>       often *is* there a blackout which a line conditioner can't handle
>       but a UPS can?  
>    4. Does anyone have (dis)recommendations?  Tripplite line
>       conditioners score highly in Eric Raymond's 386-workstation FAQ.
>       From a quick look through catalogs, there are also Sola UPSs
>       out there.  Which other manufacturers should I be considering?
>       Ability to be interfaced to the system is a plus.

First, my thanks go to Jay Rouman, Andrew Burnette, Jeff Aldrich, Y.
Tsuji, Anthony Datri, Kevin Cosgrove, Scott Gordon and Peter Wargo for
their advice and experiences.

1.  As someone kindly pointed out to me, "look on the back of the
box!".  Whoops.  Anyway, there's a 4A 110V fuse back there, so it
shouldn't take more than 440 VA even at startup.  We have a
known-working datapoint of a Sun3/50 system running on a 450 VA SPS,
and drawing 1.8A when idle -- so a 400 VA SPS (which is cheaper)
should be ok, as long as you're not overloading the Sun with eg 8M of
RAM. 

2.  Sun power supplies are generally supposed to be good; they'll live
through power fluctuations that would crash other machines.  Note that
surges that the motherboard will live through are still bad for
monitors, so a line conditioner (or better) might be a good idea...

3.  There were two separate camps : "Suns are cheap and tough, so live
dangerously", vs "I've never used anything less than a UPS/SPS since x
happened", for various x :-)

4.  Tripp-Lite, American Power Corporation, and Best products were all
recommended by name.  It's easy to find mail-order houses selling
Tripp-Lite and APC stuff in any issue of eg Computer Shopper, and the
two companies seem to be competing on price and features (good news
for us!).  Best products are tougher to find, and seems more
expensive, but got good reviews. 

There was some interest in the responses, but not enough to warrant
posting them all here; I've e-mailed an edited copy to everyone who
requested them.  E-mail me if you're interested.

Once again, thanks!

Jonathan H.