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Recommended power conditioning
This page covers recommended power for any Mac. Your Mac, its hard drives, display, etc are all delicate equipment, and subject to damage from electrical spikes, especially in lightning prone areas of the country.
A serious concern
See The Wall Street Journal: There Go the Servers: Lightning's New Perils (try this link if that one is restricted, unclear on which works when/why). Amazingly, lightning strikes are correlated with impaired economic output:
Even if electricity lines are shielded, lightning can cause power surges through unprotected phone,
cable and Internet lines -- or even through a building's walls. Such surges often show up as glitches.
...
The economists
concluded that the use of computers and the Internet spread more quickly in areas less prone to lightning strikes,
boosting worker output there. This lightning effect didn't exist prior to the 1990s.
Don’t forget other wires
If you plug in an ethernet cable, a DSL or cable modem, or anything similar, you can have your Mac fried via that cable, even if the Mac itself is on a surge protector or UPS. Any cable going in needs some form of protection eg a surge protector with phone and cable connectors.
Play the odds
There’s little you can do against any kind of close-proximity lightning strike— everything gets fried, electricity jumps around and goes wherever it goes. What we’re talking about here is reasonable protection.
Surge protector
For surge protection with no battery backup, get a surge protector. Don’t buy cheap ones, but you don’t need the most expensive ones either.There are many good models out there. See How surge protectors work.
A surge protector plugged into the wall, with the UPS plugged into the surge protector is a good combination.
The iDowell iPack PERMALINK
While I’ve long used a heavy-duty APS uninterruptible power supply, my latest favorite for general use now that the power demands of desktop machines are way down is the iDowell iPack. While the 600-watt iPack offers only about 10 minutes of “juice” for a quad-core Mac Pro Nehalem when the power fails (personal experience), it’s sleek, affordable and silent.
I’m not technically qualified to say whether this unit protects against all power issues, or against a severe voltage surge strike— you’re on your own for that. Here is the data sheet. It’s about reasonable protection at reasonable cost.
For really lighting-prone and flaky-power areas, I’d gravitate towards the more industrial-grade APC units.
Protection at an affordable price
The APC Smart-UPS 1000VA PERMALINK
This is a beefier UPS than the iDowell iPack. It is bulky and heavy (over 40 pounds) and so can support a 335 watt load for about 20 minutes. It runs a very annoying fan while charging or when power fails, but in normal operation the fan remains completely off.
I use a ponderous 1500VA version of this unit on one Mac Pro, along with an additional battery (multiple batteries can be attached for more runtime). On the other quad-core Mac Pro, I use the iDowell iPack. APC units get bigger and bigger, it all depends on how much runtime you want.
