We get a lot of power outages here. 3 years ago we had aboard on our fb500 printer die to one....$7000ish to replace. About two weeks.ago we had one and it fried the power supply. About $950 to replace.
We asked about surge protection... And we were told the main issue isn't surges, it's when the printer doesn't get enough voltage that causes the electronics to fry. And only way to fix that was to use a ups. He went into the spec sheet of.the fb500 and linked to the min requirements the flatbed needed in a ups.
Some googling.later... and we found a refurbished for $1600.... I asked if it was really.necessary, and he said $1600 is good... The guy he was at 3 days before us, same printer, same psu fried to.the same surge... Just paid $3000 for a ups for it. Then linked us the cost on repairs if mobo fried... Something like 7k.
Needless to say 1.4k is nothing when we just paid 1k to replace the psu. Just doing a bit more research before pulling the trigger....
If you look in your site preparation guide, they usually.tell you the minimum ups you need from a printer.
Whether a printer needs a ups or a surge works...I don't know. It's easy to say the tech is being over protective when the price is $1400... But they don't sell UPS's, and has no reason to upsell.. so I'm going to take.his word for.it. After all,I didn't even hesitate to spend $200 on a good one for my home PC..
And yes. An online UPS charges the battery and feeds the power to the machine via the battery. So any surges, or power dips and the printer won't even notice since it's now battery fed.
Now if you want / need to spend 2K on a ups is up to you. Most people don't need one. But We get 5-6 power outages every November/Dec. Rest of.the year we get zero... But those 5-6 have cost us close to $8,000 in 4 years.
And it only takes one, with the right conditions to cause you a 10k repair.