Yes i did consider a ups.
You have zero reasons to believe a UPS does hardware protection. For a long list of reasons that can be provided in another post, if curious.
Second, most damage is due to manufacturing defects. Not due too 'dirty' power, voltage variations, and other popular urban myths. Those other 'reasons' mostly come from speculation encouraged by advertising. Not from learning engineering and how electricity works.
Third, protection in a CO does little to protect a local KSU. Protection adjacent to that KSU can even make damage easier. Protection from transients does not exist if not recommended with numbers. For example, a potentially destructive surge can be hundreds of thousands of joules. An adjacent protector absorbs how many joules? Hundreds? A thousand? That near zero protection sell for $30 or $90. What kind of protection is that? Protection of their bottom line. And not of your hardware.
Fourth, something completely different - unfortunately called a surge protector - does protect from typically destructive transients. That costs about $1 per protected appliance. It must connect low impedance (ie less than 10 feet) to what actually does protection. To what harmlessly absorbs hundreds of thousands of joules. Single point earth ground.
Effective protection comes with numbers that claim protection from all typically destructive transients - including lightning. Lightning is typically 20,000 amps. That means a protector for AC main must be at least 50,000 amps.
Notice recommendations based in numbers. Recommendations without numbers are often only from wild speculation. Protection of a KSU means a destructive transient does not even enter a building. Without that solution (that has been standard on phone equipment over 100 years ago), then a typically destructive transient (typically once every seven years) can obtain earth ground destructive via a KSU.
But again, most damage is traceable to manufacturing defects. No magic box such as a UPS even claim to provide hardware protection. Always demand spec numbers with any recommendation. What is left is honest recommendations based in science.
