Seeking a strong power strip

[Rock Man]

I'm looking for one with 8+ sockets, made from 24k gold (corrosion resistance & optimum power transfer), enable to reduce electronic noise and takes the larger AC adapters (NeoCD, NeoGeo, Genesis, SNES, etc.)

Any recommendations would be helpful.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

I currently use a Monster Game power strip to power up my Egret II cab & miscellaneous game console A/C adapters...works wonders ever since I bought it brand new back in 2001 from a local Gamestop. It has ample room for the bigger & bulky AC adapters if it needed be but with only six dedicated outlets instead. Plus it even has a protected line for DSL as a bonus. It does have the usual 24k gold plated connections that Monster is known for + the trademarked low profile A/C power plug that fits flush against the wall without taking up valuable real estate space (compared to using a full sized A/C plug cord setup that sticks out like a sore thumb).

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[Ed Oscuro]

If you're really concerned about your consoles, a real surge suppressor / battery backup wouldn't be too expensive and would get you most of the way there. Many of those have widely spaced plugs, too. Not sure if gold is necessary if the plugs are of the same metal type (common enough). I haven't had anything corrode on me yet. I tend to unplug things not in use just to remove the possibility of surprise fryings whilst over jungles.

[CMPXCHG8B]

I'd be careful about battery backups.

A lot of consumer grade UPS backup units will output a stepped AC sine wave when running on battery backup power. The reason for this is because the cheaper UPS units generate the output signal digitally, so the output is ramped up in coarse "steps" before it ramps down and the polarity reverses.

The more expensive UPS units (usually the ones that are big and heavy) have an actual transformer in them (which accounts for a good portion of the UPS's size and weight), and they generate 12VAC internally that gets stepped up to 120VAC as a pure AC sine wave (that is, the waveform is curved- not stepped, as it should be).

The cheaper stepped UPS units used to be known to cause issues with certain types of computer power supplies. I'm unsure about consoles, but the fact remains- a cheap UPS doesn't output a perfect sine wave, so that may or may not interact with the power supplies in your consoles and it may or may not cause damage or other random unexplainable quirks if the battery happens to kick in.

APC's Back UPS units are almost all stepped sine wave output. Only the Smart UPS units and above will output a pure sine wave when on battery power.

As for power bars, I personally recommend the Belkin industrial-grade/workshop units that you can buy at Home Depot. They're stupendously heavy duty and are built out of a metal frame with wall grade receptacles mounted inside. The metal chassis itself is grounded, and the spacing between the receptacles is wide enough that most wall warts can be comfortably accommodated. They sell them in single-row and double-row variants.

I use these bars in conjunction with an APC 1500VA Smart UPS. The power bars get me power where I need it so I don't need the UPS hanging around anywhere in sight (because it's big and moderately fugly), and the UPS takes care of power spikes (over voltage), brownouts (under voltage), power outages and of course surges.

-CMPX

[ChuChu Flamingo]

CHMPXCHG8B I think what you're talking about is a non online UPS. Basically if power is switched off at outlet, it goes to battery. Online UPS is on battery all the time

When buying a UPS make sure it is ONLINE, that means it is running from battery all the time. If it is not online, it can still suffer damage from dirty power and overvoltage/undervoltage. Any competent server tech should use online, as standby batteries have a delay when switching to battery power, which defeats the entire point of having one.

I do know there are half ones that run in a mix of battery/powered form as well, but I would go with full online ones.

Right now for my main setup I have a APC 11 slot surge protector and a few monster ones. Keep in mind that even if the surge protector doesn't have enough space or power bricks, you can get one of those octopus looking extension cords that split something into multiple receptacles.

So yeah I would recommend APC. If you really are paranoid about overvoltage and undervoltage/noise I would get a online UPS.

I believe this is the model APC I have.

http://www.amazon.com/APC-11-Outlet-302 ... lectronics

[BuckoA51]

I've been using a UPS ever since we had problems with our breakers here (still being tracked down) and it's worked perfectly. It's A BR650E. Spec page says its a simulated sine wave but I can't see any negative effects of this vs plugging directly to the wall.

[CMPXCHG8B]

CHMPXCHG8B I think what you're talking about is a non online UPS. Basically if power is switched off at outlet, it goes to battery. Online UPS is on battery all the time.

Uh, sure.

I'm not aware of any online UPS units that push out a stepped sine wave, because they're all designed to output a pure 120VAC wave form irregardless of the input. That's the whole point of an online UPS, it doesn't matter what the input is- you're getting a constant output, even during a power outage (unless the batteries go dead).

My original warning was about consumer-grade UPS units. The sort of crap you buy from Staples or somewhere for $120.

When buying a UPS make sure it is ONLINE, that means it is running from battery all the time. If it is not online, it can still suffer damage from dirty power and overvoltage/undervoltage. Any competent server tech should use online, as standby batteries have a delay when switching to battery power, which defeats the entire point of having one.

Huh?

APC's Smart UPS battery backups provide protection against "dirty power" and over/under voltage by switching to battery when the input power is unclean or unsuitable for filtered passthrough. You don't need an online UPS to handle that sort of situation- just a good UPS in general.

The delay you're talking about when transferring to battery backup is negligible, that's why they're called Uninterruptible Power Supplies. I've done extensive testing on exactly this way back when I was a systems administrator. Even when loaded to close to 100% capacity, most decent UPS units will never sag under 100VAC, and this delay is never longer then around 1/10th of a second (which is the time it takes the internal relays to engage and bring the SLA battery online, there's usually a set of large bridging capacitors to handle this that the UPS runs off of in the meantime).

Online UPS units are expensive and noisy as hell. Almost all of them have more then one fan inside them, because they're constantly regulating the input -> output power and this generates heat. On a reasonable unit, the fan will spool up depending on the load placed on the UPS, but the fan still spins regardless. For someone in a residential environment this might be annoying, which is precisely the reason why I don't run an online UPS.

So yeah I would recommend APC. If you really are paranoid about overvoltage and undervoltage/noise I would get a online UPS.

Again, APC sells offline UPS units that handle this. The feature is called "AVR Boost" and "AVR Trim". Some of their lower end units support it, but mostly all of the Smart UPS units have it too. You don't need an online UPS to handle this sort of thing. Just a good UPS in general, and that usually means spending anywhere from $400 to $600 (double or triple that for an online UPS).

Basically, my rule of thumb is this- if you can buy it from Futureshop or Bestbuy or any consumer outlet, then it's not a good UPS. It'll probably work, but who knows what sort of signal that thing is going to vomit over the wires when you have an actual power outage, and who knows what that signal is going to do to your precious equipment.

-CMPX

[Ed Oscuro]

What you say about the sine waves strikes me as plausible, if one was running an online unit. For us, a UPS is only going to be meant to run intermittently, i.e. to allow orderly shutdown of the machine, and also (importantly) to prevent temporary or persistent brownouts (running undervoltage). It's nothing that will let you get away with trying to run everything off inadequate wiring but it is meant to help the situation, and I don't see why it wouldn't.

Yeah, I would also like to get ahold of one of the units with its own ferro-resonant transformer. It's a shame that the consumer electronics mindset is that it has to be cheap and easily thrown away if it breaks...an upshot of this is that UPSes probably remain in service in households long after repeated overvoltages have rendered the cheap metal-oxide varistors, found in most surge suppressors, completely useless, and "small enough" ferro-resonant transformers probably date from the 1970s and are limited in other capabilities. However, newer units have warning lights that supposedly deactivate when the device has attained obsolescence. All that said, I am not really worried about simulated AC sines out of my UPSes, because I am not often reliant upon them.

At the moment, I'm not running anything but a cheap surge suppressor for consoles and the supergun (I have been meaning to upgrade recently, though). For computing I use a couple UPS units - the APC Back-UPS 1500 XS, and an ES-750 used for a modem and a couple other random things.

It was hell trying to find out what technology in-store UPSes have; I recall a busy sales associate and it didn't help that I didn't remember the phrase metal oxide varistor, which was what I was hoping to avoid. Actually, there isn't really anything wrong with MOVs if you have generally good power supplied from the utilities, and it only is being engaged extremely rarely.

[CMPXCHG8B]

What you say about the sine waves strikes me as plausible, if one was running an online unit. For us, a UPS is only going to be meant to run intermittently, i.e. to allow orderly shutdown of the machine, and also (importantly) to prevent temporary or persistent brownouts (running undervoltage). It's nothing that will let you get away with trying to run everything off inadequate wiring but it is meant to help the situation, and I don't see why it wouldn't.

That's the issue.

Certain PFC power supplies will simply switch off if you hit them with a stepped sine wave, thus defeating the purpose of a UPS in the first place. I can't find the article right now (should have bookmarked it), but it basically likened this sort of failure to "glitching the power supply" and that certain cheaper PSUs could be permanently damaged by the interaction that causes the PSU to shut down in the first place.

I've only seen this happen once in my entire life- a very long time ago, I was in charge of maintaining a shitty scanning server (among other things), which solely existed to provide network access to the hardware hanging off a direly overpriced proprietary I/O card. The high-speed scanner itself cost several hundred thousand dollars, the scan server- probably $400 or $500.

Said machine was virtually as cheap as you could get, with the scanner manufacturers logo slapped on an empty 5.25" bay cover for good luck. We had common power outages in that office at the time (only took the city 3 years to fix it), and the scanning server didn't like that very much. It was running some abomination of Linux that would panic during boot if the machine went down hard because apparently there was a bit on the I/O card NVRAM that wouldn't get set and cause the drivers to panic during insert. This meant that I had to pop off the cover of that machine, yank the CR2032 battery off the I/O card, short the terminals together, wait a few seconds, insert the battery again then slap the cover back on and power up the machine. Every goddam time the power went out.

We contacted the company and demanded a solution- the Linux kernel was custom and booted off a read only disk-on-chip module so I couldn't modify it myself to include apcupsd or something convenient. Three weeks later the company sent out a service tech with a brand new DoC module and god help me, the cheapest fucking UPS you could buy from the local Futureshop. Of course they didn't bother to test the UPS with the particular machine we had, so it was installed regardless and I forgot about it until the power went out again.

The machine turned off as if it hadn't even been connected to the UPS, but the UPS was still running and merrily beeping away. About twice every five outages (yes, we had a lot)- the machine would just cut power and ungracefully die. The first thing I did when I realized this was to swap out the Back-UPS with a Smart-UPS, but since the scanning company wrote their own UPS daemon- the unit wasn't recognized and it wouldn't automatically shut down.

I asked one of the local engineering employees to dig out his expensive line monitoring gear so we could check the output of that Back-UPS, and what we saw would induce shock and awe in any reasonable electrician- the signal being shat out of the rear of this thing while on battery resembled something like a badly drawn level of Super Mario World then a smooth AC sine wave. The output from the Smart-UPS was perfect enough to elicit a comment from the engineer about the extreme contrast between the two.

We landed up buying another Smart-UPS of sufficient size to power the server /through/ the outage, not to gracefully shut it down. To my knowledge, that system never once went down while on that particular UPS. I later heard from a friend who worked there long after I left that the scan server and the Smart-UPS were probably the two most reliable pieces of gear in the office after they brought in a retard who thought it would be brilliant to move their Exchange server into a data centre and run it across a VPN.

TLDR; I'd rather be safe then sorry. $500 isn't a lot for a UPS if your gear is worth more then that. A blown PSU in some ancient and otherwise mint console is going to suck, because now not only are the parts not original (if you did repair it)- but you're going to have to cut through whatever "WARRANTY IS VOID" stickers that might adorn the chassis.

-CMPX

[ChuChu Flamingo]

I guess I forgot to clarify, just don't buy a offline/stand by power supply. Ferro-resonant would seem to be the best choice in this situation

Online will always be my choice when running a server if my ass is on the line.

It really isn't that important for consumers when you are just running consoles and stuff, and power goes out but when servers don't shut down properly when power is cut, it usually never is.