Protecting Hardware on Unstable Power Sources?

psuedo_samurai asks: "Later this year, I will be returning for a visit to a small 3rd world country in Africa. I was lucky enough to travel to the country before, and the last time that I went I was able to bring four fully functional computers that I donated to a local high school, to provide a small computer network for teaching purposes. I had loaded Red Hat Linux with Open Office and a multitude of free goodies onto the systems and everything was working well. The equipment I brought back with me survived for about 12 months, but eventually fell victim to power surges, brownouts, blackouts, and so forth. On my return, I will be better prepared and am planning on setting up 8 computers, this time around. However, I am still stuck on how to best provide either a battery backup (aside from lugging UPS's along with me) with automatic shutdown and/or AVR on the cheap. Does anyone have any good references, experience, or suggestions on how to over come the challenge of running a computer network in a country where the power fluctuates wildly and multiple outages in week are not unusual occurrences?"

Comments

419?

[tepples]

I will be returning for a visit to a small 3rd world country in Africa.

I hope this doesn't have anything to do with an advance fee scam someone sent to your e-mail, does it?

Bike and a dynamo

[Dark$ide]

Get a pedal cycle and a dynamo. You should be able to produce 150W+ with that for a short while (an hour or two). If you can't get a bike try a Concept 2 rowing machine - I've pulled 400W on one of those (until I reached VO2 max and fell off).