{"id":8480,"date":"2016-08-09T00:01:49","date_gmt":"2016-08-09T07:01:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=8480"},"modified":"2016-08-05T21:23:39","modified_gmt":"2016-08-06T04:23:39","slug":"power-strip-insanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=8480","title":{"rendered":"Power Strip Insanity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Power strips are pretty common. Not only do I have them in my office, but the HDTV has one. Even the kitchen TV has a power strip. And they’re not just those boxy sticks with a row of plugs on them. Power strips can be quite complicated, which makes the choosing and buying process frustrating.
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\nThis topic is on my mind because one of my power strips broke the other day. I had just used it, too, which is odd that it broke. Being a nerd, I took it out to the Wambooli Space\/Time Laboratory (my garage) and disassembled it. I figured I could hack it back into shape, but more importantly, I wanted to see what broke.<\/p>\n

I used a circuit tester on the power strip, and its ground and neutral wires were okay, but the switch was bad. I had a spare and I could have soldered it in as a replacement, but I figured I’d just toss the thing out.<\/p>\n

The power strip is shown in Figure 1. It’s an old-but-traditional inline model, which doesn’t help when you have plugs that are fatter than the typical lamp plug.<\/p>\n

\"Figure

Figure 1. The old, inline power strip I tried to hack. The power switch is broken.<\/p><\/div>\n

Today, I often pay a bit more to get a power strip designed to handle fat charging adapters. These strips position the adapters at some distance or line up the plugs in different directions. Figures 2 through 4 show some examples from around my office and house. (And my mom doesn’t read this blog, so I didn’t bother dusting before I snapped the photos.)<\/p>\n

\"Figure

Figure 2. See how nicely those power bricks fit onto this power strip? The sockets are well-spaced and oriented away from each other.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Figure

Figure 3. This is an older power strip (and it’s been under my desk for a long time, hence the dust and cat hair), but the sockets are oriented away from each other and spaced well apart.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Figure

Figure 4. This strip is a mess! It powers the HDTV and a host of gizmos. Belkin makes good stuff.<\/p><\/div>\n

If you go power strip shopping, you’ll find a host of features designed to befuddle you: timers, surge suppression, switched\/unswitched, and so on. The variety is nice, but sheesh. What you really want are wide-spaced sockets and different orientations on the plugs. I mean, why pay for a 6-socket power strip when you can use only four of the sockets?<\/p>\n

In the end, I didn’t bother replacing the old, broken power strip. I have a few spares hanging in the boneyard, so I used one of them. It was a six-plug, inline power strip. I need to power four items, two of which are the bulky power connectors, so I’m losing two slots. It’s a wash.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who would have imagined that buying something as simple as a power strip could be so complicated?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[15],"class_list":["post-8480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8480"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8498,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8480\/revisions\/8498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}