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[HOW TO] Stop loadshedding frying your electronics

With loadshedding being an everyday occurrence now, you are likely quite worried about the electronics in your home or business and are looking for ways to protect them from being damaged by fluctuations in the electricity supply.

Here are two things you can do that should help minimise the chances of anything untoward happening to your sensitive – and expensive – electronic devices.

What these won’t do, it must be said, is protect your electronics from a lightning strike. Should that happen you’re a bit stuffed. Sorry. The only way to defeat lightning strikes is to unplug everything before they hit.

UPS, UPS, UPS

APC_UPS_Surge_Protection

UPSes, or Uninterruptible Power Supplies, form a defensive barrier between the power that enters your premises, and your equipment.

They regulate the incoming electricity and are designed to maintain a very specific power output that remains constant even when the electricity supply isn’t.

They also come with built-in batteries that last anything from 15 minutes to an hour, which keeps everything attached powered on in the event of a power failure, giving you the chance to power them down properly.

A sudden loss of power, should it occur frequently, can eventually damage sensitive circuitry, leading to your device’s failure. This includes printers, network equipment, TVs, audio systems, alarm clocks, basically anything that uses an electronic circuit, so these are the things you should connect to a UPS.

If your budget is limited, connect the most important electronics to individual UPSes and keep everything else unplugged during loadshedding hours, powering down shortly before it’s scheduled to start.

Cost range: From R1 500 and up (way up)

Get a multi-plug with a fuse

Multi-plug with surge protection

Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of a multi-plug with a fuse when it comes to protecting against damaging surges and spikes.

The concept is very simple: when a surge occurs, a fuse inside the plug activates a circuit-breaker that severs the connection to the mains, saving everything connected to the plug from the surge.

These tend to be cheaper than multi-plugs that divert surges down a grounding wire; for this to be effective requires that the multi-plug be connected to a properly-grounded outlet.

On multi-plugs that make use of a fuse, pressing the button that pops up back down reconnects the multi-plug to the mains and ensures you don’t have to manually replace the fuse every time a surge happens.

Surge protectors can’t keep your electronics powered up in the event of a blackout, but offer a cheap and effective safety measure when a UPS is out of your budget’s reach.

Cost range: From R200

[Featured image – CC by Public Domain]

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