Hello everyone, I live in Pakistan where due to rising energy costs and decreased supply the government has started load shedding for a couple of hours every day. Because of this problem I set up a UPS solution which is an inverter connected to 2 80Ah car batteries in parallel. With this inverter/UPS setup I'm able to power my PC, monitor, DSL modem + router, and 3 ceiling fans and about 10 CFL bulbs without any problem. However one problem that I have is when the electric company's power turns off and my UPS switches over to battery supply, the delay is about half a second and my PC reboots. After it reboots I can keep the PC on for the entire time the power is gone without any problem, however just when the power goes out it won't stay on because of the lag in the time it takes for the UPS to kick in. One interesting thing to note is that if at my apartment's circuit box I turn off the breaker which supplies the UPS with electricity from the power company (thereby enabling the UPS to use its battery supply), the computer DOESN'T reboot! In fact it stays on without any problem. However if I am to turn off the MAIN power switch in the circuit box (which turns all the power to the apartment off -- simulating a situation when the power company kills the supply) then the computer DOES reboot. I'm not sure what the underlying reason for this is but someone suggested that if I was to insert some sort of capacitor into the circuit between the UPS's supply and my computer's power supply to somehow handle the lag of the UPS for that half second until it switches over to battery supply I would be able to keep my PC from rebooting. I would love anyone's suggestions on whether or not a capacitor in between UPS and PC would be the right solution or if there is any other way I can go about keeping my PC on when it switches from electric company to UPS. Thank you very much for reading this! :)

Hi, A friend/client of mine works in a car dealership that has a breakroom. The breakroom has a sink, countertop, and a countertop (portable) microwave oven plugged into the the one (and only one) outlet over the countertop. They would like to add a garbage disposal to the sink, and she asked me what I thought about the possibility of this, and if I would like to install it. There is currently no outlet under the sink for it, so one would have to be installed there. The most convenient (not necessarily the best) source for the disposal power is tapping off from the countertop outlet, and fishing cable down to under the sink. Since I'm mostly familiar with residential (not commercial) wiring, I figured I would look into this by first determining what the NEC requirements are for this particular situation. I'm getting conflicting info on whether this counts as a "non-dwelling kitchen" or not. Anyone here know for sure? I know if this were a standard residential kitchen, you would be violating code by using the small appliance countertop outlets for disposal power. Regardless, I'm thinking it would be a bad idea to have the countertop microwave and disposal on the same circuit. Together, they would be just under 80% of the total available watts, but there is almost no capacity left over for additional appliances that might be brought in (e.g. popcorn popper?), or if they brought in a more powerful microwave later on, resulting in frequent nuisance breaker tripping. What do you guys think?