Surge Protector Advice Needed

[Totempole]

Since I've never really experienced any serious power surges in my area, I haven't given much thought to surge protection. A while back I bought an Ellies surge protector plug, similar to the one below on a sale.

http://www.ellies.co.za/electrical/FBWPP


I figured it might be a good idea to connect it at the wall in my PC room, what with Eskom's load shedding and all. I have 3 PC's and an Ink Jet printer connected to single wall socket, with the help of a power strip. The Ellies Surge Protector is rated for a load of 250V/16A. I think it was intended for 2 appliances only.

So my question is, would it be okay to connect this surge protector to the wall socket and plug the power strip with the PCs and Printer into the surge protector? Or will I overload the surge protector?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[bruce_the_loon]

You will be fine, 16A will cover much more that your 3 PCs and a printer. The 3 pin plug in the wall is rated for 16A and that can handle kettles, toasters, heaters etc. The PCs and printer will probably draw no more than 3A to 4A, my entire house draws 3.9A when the fridge, 2 PCs, monitors, 40" TV, sound system and half a dozen lights are running.

Computer power supplies may be rated at 500W or 750W, but a basic PC with a single drive and LCD monitor will pull less than 200W over the supply. It's only when you have triple-SLI video cards and more than 4 drives that you head into the heavier load regions, but even there you'll need multiple machines with 1000W supplies to reach 16A on the wall end of the multiplug.

 

[Totempole]

You will be fine, 16A will cover much more that your 3 PCs and a printer. The 3 pin plug in the wall is rated for 16A and that can handle kettles, toasters, heaters etc. The PCs and printer will probably draw no more than 3A to 4A, my entire house draws 3.9A when the fridge, 2 PCs, monitors, 40" TV, sound system and half a dozen lights are running.

Computer power supplies may be rated at 500W or 750W, but a basic PC with a single drive and LCD monitor will pull less than 200W over the supply. It's only when you have triple-SLI video cards and more than 4 drives that you head into the heavier load regions, but even there you'll need multiple machines with 1000W supplies to reach 16A on the wall end of the multiplug.

Thanks for the info. I'll definitely make use of it then. Not sure how much it'll help in terms of load shedding, but I guess it's better than nothing.

I have one machine that I'd think would easily consume about 450W, but the other two are mostly just used as file servers and probably consume less than 200W each.