Slashdot Mirror
Need... More... Power...
MikeDawg writes "After dealing with the headache of never having enough electrical outlets, not having a cable TV coaxial, not having a telephone hookup in the right places of my apartment, I found this article at CNN. It is nice to see that college dorm rooms are getting filled with outlets to provide students with enough hook-ups with for all their electronics. My question to you (renters/dorm-room dwellers) is does your dorm room or apartment have enough outlets, whether it be electrical, cable, telephone, or anything else you may need? What do you do in a situation like this? Do you load up each socket with a 10+ port power strip (or battery backup as it may be) and pray that you don't knock-out the circuit everytime you start burning a CD?"
I must say that I don't have enough power in my room. There's only one outlet here and I run a PC, (musical) keyboard, guitar effects kit, DSL modem, clock, etc etc. I have a power strip plugged into another power strip. An interesting side effect is that when I turn on my fan, my USB hub reboots.
OK as somebody that can spec eletrical this is plain BS. Those cheap surge strips are not capable of dealing with large spikes due to poor grouding. Whole house units dont protect you from that 2000 watt hair drier (BTW you can not get 2000 watts out of a 15 amp plug per UL you should only draw 80% and thats 12 amps for 1320 watts max same for those vacume cleaners)
Anyway enough ranting for a good home entertainment setup you would want at least one dedicated circut perferably 20 or 30 amps if you can use the 30 amp back 20 amp front recepticals in your building code . A single line surge or UPS unit might also be a good idea (something in the nice back APC RM line but thats over a grand in UPS) especialy for the Tivo and Replay users but also for the big screen TV guys. I say UPS simple because loosing power is hell on any device while it's working and the brownouts are also hell when you remember that modern eletronics are never realy off unless unpluged remotes and all that.
No sir I dont like it.
My last apartment both my roommate and I would lose power (and thus our poor boxen would lose data) every time we used the microwave too high or too long. First solution: battery backups (10 bucks each with Staples rebates, g-d bless).
So no more data loss, but still an annoyance. Then I was stupidly toying with the inside of the light switch for the living room and sparks flew and I blew the circuit. Lucky for us, this led me to discover that there was a 3rd circuit (yes, two circuits was not nearly enough*) for our floor dedicated to a single light bulb that must have been added years after all the other electrical stuff.
So we ran to Home Depot (g-d bless you overpriced bastards) and back and hacked in a 4-port outlet and we were golden ever since.
So the moral of the story: when you don't have enough outlets, make more. As a geek you have a instinctive understanding of electricity.
*The ancient washer and drying in the basement would trip the other circuit if they ran together
Our dorm has something like six pairs of recepticles, and we have 11-outlet strips plugged into each and every one to power my many boxen. We're not allowed to use extension cords or piggyback surges strips, so we have to be careful and plan very well...
I also haven't turned on all the machines at once, because I'm fairly sure it would kill the circuit. I used to have half of these machines spread in my basement, and the load they would generate if they all switched on simultaneously, as the drives and fans were spinning up, was enormous; it would trip the breaker every time.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive