but it's hardly going to see me through a serious power cut.
Consumer-type UPS's are meant to give you time to shut down gracefully, not to keep you going through an extended loss of power.
Indeed and is not just chap consumer AC type UPS either. Commercial “on-line” UPS’s costing from hundreds to many hundreds of thousands, all operate on the same principle - they are short term (typically less than 30 minutes) duration reserves of power designed either for the mains to come back in that time - or an alternative - like standby diesel to come on steam and take up the load.
By and large AC type UPS are designed around this “short and sharp” standup philosophy.
The fallacy that many folks fall into is that they look at the full load runtimes and divide it by (the very modest) load requirements of say broadband kit and arrive at monster theoretical up times. Typically they don’t work that way as the lead acid battery at the heart of the unit, has a working voltage range/operating window which is quite narrow and the UPS shuts down relatively early to avoid deep discharge of the pack.