SurgeArrest Perfomance surge protector

Pocket-lint

By Stuart Miles

Published Jun 28, 2005

Here at Pocket-lint we like to pride ourselves on reviewing nothing too über-geeky - you won’t find reviews of PC fans or memory here - life’s too short for that. However when APC contacted and asked us if we wanted to review an eight-gang plug adapter we couldn’t resist.

Don’t get us wrong, the prospect of writing, let alone reading a review of eight gang plug adapter sounded as exciting as watching paint dry, but this, it transpires is no ordinary eight-gang plug adapter.

This is an eight-gang plug adapter that comes with a whopping £75,000 lifetime connected equipment protection policy meaning if your devices get fried while connected to this bad boy you can claim up to £75k in compensation. Now that I’ve got your attention let me tell you a little more about the product.

This device is the hardest of the hardcore, it’s almost diamond cut, it’s that hardcore. The device will protect you against surges of up to 93,000Amps.

The Surge Arrest Performance offers eight plug sockets with four of them offering Always On connection. This means if you turn the unit off they stay on and has been designed so you don’t lose power to things like alarm clocks and video recorders with timers when you want to turn everything else off via the switch.

But power surges don’t just come down the plug socket, oh no, they come from television aerials, telephone sockets and network cabling so just to make sure you don’t suffer from a power surge through these areas are covered as well.

The SurgeArrest Performance Surge Protector does this by including the option to connect your telephone socket, network Ethernet cable and even your video’s coaxial cable via the system. Amazingly, APC even includes the correct cables for you to do this without having to separately buy them once you get the box home and the easy to follow symbols means it takes seconds to get it set up. Connect the telephone directly from the wall and then out again to your phone and your covered.

Get everything rigged up and the device will light up and tell you if you are overloading the system with too many plugs. It will even let you know whether the wiring in your house or office is up to scratch.

Our quick take

This is one mean machine and while we can’t test its power surging capabilities to the full until we get a full-on lightning storm in future - we tried to stand out in the rain holding a long metal pole - we get the feeling that with a £75,000 bounty for not working, its going to work.

This may be a little extreme for the average household user, but perfect for those who like to be safe or just wander around the house/office with tin foil on their head.