Customer Reviews: Read 36 more reviews...
 Belkin surge protection with battery backup September 15, 2008
I am very impressed with this item. It is a very good value for the money.
Almost Sent It Back August 13, 2008
This product is perfect for my needs, but the initial break-in was rough. This unit smelled like bubbling battery acid/hot plastic for almost 2 weeks. It was so bad that I started to look for an alternate place to put it so that when I was sitting at the computer I couldn't smell it. It did stop smelling and it is working like a champ!
I love Belkin products June 11, 2008
I have five Belkin units pf varying capacities protecting my computes and AV equipment and they all work great. I live in an area of frequent power outages and I keep my computers on all the time. The Belkins do a great job of protecting my equipment and shutting them down when the power loss is extensive.
IMHO you can't go wrong with this product line.
Replaced 3 APCs with this one, couldn't be happier April 25, 2008
I use to think APC brand is the name to trust in Battery Backups until all 8 of my APCs died on my within 6 month of purchase. Contacted APC to get replacements on the 1 that I knew I barely got 2 month ago, they said 1 computer and 1 monitor was too much for that backup to handle.... Well for the same price I bought this Belkin and it handles my computer, monitor, printer, all perfectly fine.
This is the 3rd one, already used the 1st one for about 9 month now, no problem at all. Will soon switch all the UPSs to Belkin, I guess name brand doesn't always = great product.
 A tale of two UPS's February 8, 2008
14 out of 14 found this review helpful
I just returned my Belkin F6C550-AVR. I liked the form factor (tall with plugs on top) and the price/feature tradeoff looked great. I bought it and followed all the directions to a tee. But there was more to the story:
1) Smell - the chemical smell this thing gives off when charging is noxious. It gave me a headache. I'm not exaggerating.
2) Wasteful - Even when nothing is plugged into it and it's fully charged, it draws 18 watts, as measured by my Kill-A-Watt. That's like leaving a CFL lightbulb on 24/7.
3) Software - The software installs under the name "Automatic Power Management Software". The Belkin website calls it "Bulldog v2" I call it "Bulls#!t". It was apparently written in China by people who know nothing of common UI idioms. It eats up too much space on disk. It is buggy. For example, the "load" was shown as 22%, which made me think it was sized with plenty of headroom. Then I unplugged it to test it, and the load reading jumped up to 43%. Oops. Furthermore, it does not tell you the really useful info: how many minutes remain, what's the current charge level of the battery, What's the current input voltage, etc. What's worse is that it has an administrator password, which gives you access to change things, but the login didn't work! It would accept my blank password (as per the manual) but then would immediate revert back to "read only" mode. So many of the features were not accessible. And did I mention the UI sucked?
So what did I do? Like a good engineer, I researched the alternatives and bought the CyberPower CP850AVRLCD. A little more expensive but *much* more usable, and higher capacity too. It only draws 7 watts when turned off, it doesn't stink up the room, it has a beautiful LCD screen which gives you status, and the software actually works. Plus it gives you status on the useful info, so you actually will know the thing is wearing out before you have your next outage.
To be fair, some people might like the Belkin unit. The mechanical design isn't bad and the price is right. And the software, while half-baked, attempts to include enterprise functions which would be great if you could get them to work. In short, if you plan to use it in the garage or server closet where the smell doesn't matter, you don't mind fighting with the software, you don't care to know the status of the unit, and you're OK with wasting 18 watts constantly, then this could work. Otherwise, I'd look at CyberPower, APC, and Tripp-Lite. Good luck.
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