My new 10-way powerboard arrived today and I wired it into the booth along with a PowerShield Defender 1200 UPS battery which I had spare.
Then I had two spare powerboards so I installed one of them (with an RCD Safety Switch) behind the bench. You can see it in the photo below. The thing you can see plugged in on the top is my Watt Meter, it reports on current draw and power usage.
I am pretty happy with today’s handiwork.
Happy New Year! Best wishes to all my friends for 2024.
I have this weird problem with my new studio computer ‘verve‘. When I press the power button, it doesn’t turn on. It does have 15 USB cables plugged into it, and quite a number of those are powered, which seems to affect the system.
The power for most of the devices on my bench goes through a PowerShield Defender 1600VA UPS battery, and then through an Arlec PB91 Residual Current Device (RCD).
The RCD has a test feature so you can press the button on the RCD and it will trip the safety which will disconnect the power. If I do this most of the equipment on my bench will turn off (but, importantly, not my workstation ‘verve’) including all the powered USB devices which are interfering with my computer.
After I trip the RCD I can power on my computer, and then once it’s powered on I can reset the RCD and bench power is restored. It’s a bit fiddly but at least it works!
Thanks to my mate Raz I now have an Arlec Single Outlet Safety Switch from Bunnings. It’s a 30mA residual-current device (RCD), which is a type of earth-leakage circuit breaker (ELCB).
Over here:
You can see my bench UPS in the bottom right:
It’s a PowerShield Defender 1200VA.
The UPS then has the Arlec device in the back of it, which then powers the rest of my bench (behind the scissors):
You can see I still have my Xbox power cable plugged in. We’re not sure exactly what that does. In addition to an electronic fuse maybe an RCD or maybe an arc-fault circuit interrupter (AFCI) or maybe all of the above.