Label
The back’s label showcases two familiar warnings about dry locations and no daisy-chaining.
We observe a protection rating of 500V between any two conductors, which is the most lax rating for a 120V surge protector. While this may seem bad considering that modern universal input devices only have 400V input capacitors, 500V is a worst-case figure for a maximum rating surge that may one-shot the unit's MOVs. Everyday surges are nowhere near that strong and will get clamped to far more reasonable levels.
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Front
The top of Amazon’s surge protector features a column of six outlets in the center and two columns of three outlets on the sides. Gray silk-screening identifies ports on the left side and provides an LED legend in the bottom-right corner. All outlets have gray shutters, while Amazon’s branding is printed in the fingerprint-magnet glossy black area.
Overall, I’d say it's pleasantly minimalist.
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Shutters
Built-in shutters appear to be increasingly common on power bars of all shapes, sizes, and price points. Between molding slots into the cover for clip-in sliding shutters to snap into and molding completely separate plug-in outlet covers, the sliding covers may be cheaper to manufacture. They also spare you the trouble of managing (or losing) loose caps.
I’m not a fan of shutters, but at least these aren’t the fancy automatic type that occasionally require brutal insertion force or a plug-wiggle to make them slide out of the way.
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First Peek
Inside the unit, we find four circuit boards: the main surge suppression in the top-left corner, coax protection in the top-right, phone protection in the bottom-right, and indicator LEDs in the bottom-left.
As appears to be tradition for transformer-spaced lateral outlets, the internal construction can actually accommodate an extra outlet in-between, but every other outlet is omitted on the front cover.
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Coax Protection
There's nothing fancy about the RF surge protection: we find two stud-style F-connectors through a single-sided circuit board soldered to the ground plane with a transient suppression diode between the ground plane and "input" connector, along with a piece of wire between the F-connectors’ pins. This is the same thing you’ll find in most generic coax surge protectors, minus the shielding can.
I’d be curious to put these through a transfer function analyzer to find out whether construction style (mainly, this tower style versus APC's routed PCB) makes any difference
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Telephone Protection
Telephone surge protection is provided by one fuse and one 271KD07 MOV for each wire of the primary pair. As with the coax protection, it doesn’t get much more basic than this.
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Daisy-Chain
Internal wiring is somewhat odd, with live and ground fed from the left end of the top strip, daisy-chained to the middle strips at the right end, then to the third strip at the left end. Neutral, on the other hand, starts on the center strip and forks to the bottom strip. Meanwhile, the top strip is daisy-chained to the right end of the middle strip. I would have preferred to see all three strips connected in parallel from the left end to minimize worst-case wiring losses. Instead, they pile up by needlessly passing power through the full length of multiple metal strips.
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Side Strips
Live and neutral on the lateral outlets are provided by pinch contacts, while ground contact is provided by those dreaded flaps that have a tendency to permanently deform and no longer make reliable contact over time.
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Center Strips
The middle outlet strips are common fare for budget power bars: they're fundamentally the same flapped ground strip in the center and offset-punched slotted strips for live and neutral.
This isn't the most reliable connection style in my experience, but there are countless UL-listed relocatable power taps using these two styles, which should mean they aren’t particularly problematic safety-wise.
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Strip Welds
All connections to metal strips appear to be spot-welds, with tin from the plated wires oozing out from the weld under heat and pressure.
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