Surge Protector Review submitted by Walter Knightman
To maintain home theater and home office applications, many people set up rack mounts for housing. Well, along with your mounted equipment you can install a rack mount surge protector to protect all your serious electronic network gadgets. Most offer several outlets of protection and mount easily into any enclosure with predrilled holes. You need surge protection on high-dollar electrical items like laser printers, servers, wireless routers, and most other computer accessories that plug into wall outlets. This will help keep from overloading an electrical outlet with TV and home theater equipment connected to it. This overheating can lead to a power surge in your home to cause a fire.
Rack mount surge protectors allow you to conveniently safeguard all of your equipment from a central point without having cords all over the place, too. Most of the surge protectors are very thin to accommodate space issues and not take away from your arrangement. You should get a good 20 Amp, 120 Volt protector. For any quality surge protector Joules are important and whatever the rating is, it should be divided by the number of outlets so that you can gauge how much protection each outlet is receiving. You want at least 300 Joules per outlet for rack mount equipment. More is always better when it comes to surge protection but 300 Joules is sufficient for most applications.
On a quality rack mounted surge protector there will be a protective circuit breaker. The reset switch could be on either the front or back of the unit depending on who manufacturers it. It will also have EMI/RFI protection from line noise, at the very least, at 40 decibels. The number of outlets can range from six to sixteen. Again, make sure you have the proper amount of Joules protection. Clamp voltage of 336 volts is best. Most models mount from the front and once you plug it in, your rack mount surge protector is ready to use.
Now let’s look at a couple protectors and compare.
The Isobar Rack Mount Surge Suppressor. I don’t like this product, simply because of the Joule rating. It has a rating of 1280 Joules and it has 12 outlets. That’s a little over 100 Joules per outlet and since we want at least 300 per outlet, this rack mount surge protector falls short. Tripp Lite makes good products, but this one should be left on the rack, at the store. I feel like the 15 amp breaker would trip far too often with a 140V clamping voltage and too much time would pass before the surge protector went to work. It does have 60,000 amps of max surge protection which means you get a long life out of it, but it’s not enough for a fully loaded surge protector with so little response time, especially for $149.00.
Monster Cable Power Center Pro 900. Monster already has a bad rap for being overpriced with low quality products, but I’ve used Monster Cable products before and have had no qualms with the products. However, in the rack mount department, again, this surge protector falls short. With 10 outlets and only 1820 Joules of protection, we still haven’t met our minimum requirement. 185 Joules is still better than 106, but still it doesn’t make me happy. Your best bet is to upgrade to the Monster Power Pro 2500. This is much better protection for the money. This is rackmount surge protection with 2775 Joules, with 8 outlets that’s 346 Joules protecting each outlet. That’s what I’m talking about. This is what to look for when buying a surge protector that mounts to a rack system.
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