I’m moving to the Philippines in a couple of weeks, with work, for the next 2-3 years. Have decided to bring all my gear with me. Hoping to get some more time for it, with more affordable childcare/domestic help etc.! They do get power cuts when the typhoons hit. Apartment blocks will have generators that kick in, but I think you still get a potentially dangerous surge when it cuts out.
Looking at standard extension chord power strips, many of them claim to have built in surge protection, but I’m not sure whether there are other more serious/reliable options?
Was reading on Reddit where they talked about ‘power conditioning’ solutions. I will probably have 10-12 pieces of gear/pedals etc plugged in at any one time.
Grateful for any thoughts on this. Seems like I should be unplugging everything as well when storms are on the horizon…
Standard surge protection should in most cases protect your gear but my understanding is that any connection can be overwhelmed. In addition to the surge protection the power is also blasting through all the fuses in its path.
For total protection I would assume you’d need some kind of middle-man solution like a PSU that isn’t directly passing the current from the socket to the device.
I’ve had computers and music gear and all sorts of electronics plugged into walls with and without surge protection, with and without power conditioners for multiple decades through all manor of seasons, storms that scared the sh!t out of me while safely inside.
Hurricanes, tornados, power outages, terrorist attacks on power grids, 120+ year old homes, and have never had a power related failure on literally thousands of pieces of electronics equipment considering personal and work related items.
Your mileage may vary though, and might not be as lucky as I’ve been. I do tend to use a moderately priced powered backup for my computer/drive based items (computer, gaming system, Akai Force - anything where data needs to be written to a medium)
Just enough of a backup to power things down if the grid goes offline. Safe travels!
a power conditioner is for clean power, an uninterruptible power supply is for giving you time to save what you’re working on and powering down safely.
the only thing that will protect you from power surges that can fry your gear is breakers/fuses that are already inside the house + 90% of gear these days has external power supply, which have protections against that kind of stuff anyway.
power conditioners are great if you live in a place with dirty/jumpy electricity.
im using TAGA Harmony PF-1000 for all my needs, and its really nice.
it definitely smooths out peaks and dips a lot. right now i often have power outages that last ±1 second, and it swallows it without shutting devices off, also removes static noise in pc audio.
i dont know the market for them rn, so maybe there are affordable and compact power conditioners/surge protectors that are good. but when i was shopping for them, good ones were always bulky and were 200$+ (though i think they should be cheaper and its just that audiophile pricetag )
I would look at a battery backup UPS. The better ones have battery backup, surge and line conditioning. Furthermore, protects from brown outs which can be strenuous on electronics. It would also protect you from the time power loss till the generator kicks on.
I vote for a decent UPS, too that gives you the chance / some minutes to shut down and disconnect everything even after a power failure before lightning strikes your house
Thanks everybody… Most useful tips as ever. You always learn something new around here.
I arrived in Manila, and my gear did – eventually – as well. I’m now facing a strange situation where I get crackling/popping from the mixer, every 10-50 seconds or so. Very audible. Even when all my connected gear is switched off.
I recorded it in Audacity – see screenshot (top one is normalised).
Interestingly, if I change nothing except unplugging the cables, the popping is gone.
Could this be due to jumpy/unclean electricity coming from the sockets? And if so, would something like this …be a potential solutions?
“APC Easy UPS BVX900LI-MS 230V AVR Universal Sockets” with 900VA/480W
The description talks about “automatic voltage regulation”… What I’m not clear about is how much power I’ll need. Looking at e.g. the Octatrack specs, it says 12VDC and 2A min draw.
Am I right in calculating (using the calculator below) that this equates to 24VA if it is single-phase and c.40VA if it is three-phase?
No idea if i have single-phase or three-phase, but regardless the above calculation would suggests that something rated at 900VA/480W should be plenty for my needs (the mixer’s manual says that “power consumption is 50W”. They also have a more pricey model with 1200VA/650watts but that seems overkill…
Thanks in advance for any further thoughts on this!
EDIT: there is also something like this, for c.GBP 20, which doesn’t have a battery but is just a voltage regulator/surge protector…
Hello - just popping this in for posterity - to say I figured out the issue…
It wasn’t dodgy power. Rather, the semi-random (always between 10 and 40-ish seconds apart) static burst I was hearing - with gear plugged into the mixer but everything except the mixer switched off - was electromagnetic interference (I think I got that term right).
Basically, I had an extension lead running alongside a bunch of the audio cables, and the latter were picking something up from the electrical cord, and pushing these bursts into the mixer.
Realistically if anything makes it to your surge protector, there will be damage no matter what you have because usually the only thing that can overwhelm the electrical infrastructure that badly is something like a lightning strike. At which point only something like home insurance will help.
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