A home Malairte rig often runs while you are asleep or out, which makes it exactly the kind of always-on machine that benefits from clean, protected power. A brief brownout, surge, or outage can crash the miner, corrupt files, or stress components. Sizing protection correctly is simple once you know your real wall draw.

Start with your measured watts

You cannot size a UPS without knowing your actual load - measure it with a meter or smart plug first. Say your rig draws 400W from the wall. Note that UPS units are often rated in VA (volt-amps) as well as watts, and the watt figure is the one that matters for runtime; a "650VA" unit might only deliver around 400W.

Pick a UPS rating with headroom

  • Add about 25% headroom over your measured draw, so a 400W rig wants a UPS rated for at least 500W of real output.
  • Decide how much runtime you need. A UPS is not meant to keep mining through a long outage - its job is to ride out short blips and give you time for a clean shutdown.
  • For unattended rigs, choose a UPS that can signal your PC over USB to trigger an automatic safe shutdown when battery runs low.

Configure automatic shutdown

  1. Connect the UPS to your PC by USB.
  2. Install the UPS vendor's software, or use the built-in Windows UPS support under Power Options.
  3. Set it to stop the miner and shut down cleanly when the battery drops below, say, 30%.

This protects against the worst case: an outage long enough to drain the battery while you are away. The rig powers down gracefully instead of being hard-killed.

Surge protection is separate

A surge protector clamps voltage spikes from lightning or grid switching; a UPS adds battery backup and usually surge protection too. If you only buy one thing, a UPS with built-in surge protection covers both. A cheap power strip labelled "surge protector" with a low joule rating offers little real defence - look for a joule rating in the thousands.

What not to do

Do not plug a laser printer or space heater into the same UPS as your rig - their startup surges can trip it. Do not run a high-draw multi-GPU rig through an undersized unit; if the rig draws more than the UPS can deliver, it will overload and cut out. Match the rating to your measured load and leave headroom.