How to tell if your Power strip Fails ?

Power Strips/Power Taps are not the proper thing to use with electronics, should be Surge Protectors. Surge Protectors are designed to trip when experiencing power surges/bumps and can fail at some point, if in doubt replace it. In my experience a Surge Protector will cost $25.00USB or more while the others will much less. The back of the device will say which it is and give ratings. I have seen where the polarity of wiring in older buildings was reversed, can cause problems. Testers can be found relatively inexpensive at hardware stores. Same when using the older Dial-up Modem Internet connections when the phone jacks had the wires reversed, a phone would work but not the Modem. As for the 1600W power supply, if having other things plugged into the wall sockets you may be reaching the limit of the circuit feeding the room. The circuit breakers are usually rated at 15Amps or about 1800Watts. Pulling more power than that would definitely be a safety hazard if the breaker doesn't trip with an overload.

Smell it and check the colour. I have had UK ones but most of my plugs are European (which have round plugs slightly wider than the UK holes). They go brown (burning dust across bad contacts I guess) and smell a bit before they break.

If not plug in something and measure the resistance but I don't know if that would help as the current would be so low it would probably prove nothing.

Berton said:

I have seen where the polarity of wiring in older buildings was reversed,

Can it really? I thought AC meant it didn't matter and +ve and -ve wires were the same as they swapped 50 times a second or whatever. You don't have DC circuits in the states do you? I'm not an electrician obviously.

Berton said:

Power Strips/Power Taps are not the proper thing to use with electronics, should be Surge Protectors. Surge Protectors are designed to trip when experiencing power surges/bumps and can fail at some point, if in doubt replace it. In my experience a Surge Protector will cost $25.00USB or more while the others will much less. The back of the device will say which it is and give ratings. I have seen where the polarity of wiring in older buildings was reversed, can cause problems. Testers can be found relatively inexpensive at hardware stores. Same when using the older Dial-up Internet connections when the phone jacks had the wires reversed.

As for the 1600W power supply, if having other things plugged into the wall sockets you may be reaching the limit of the circuit feeding the room. The circuit breakers are usually rated at 15Amps or about 1800Watts. Pulling more power than that would definitely be a safety hazard if the breaker doesn't trip with an overload.

Well let me rephrase that it's a belkin surge protector but it's like 8 years old now something like 100,000 joules

Also i don't even think i'm pulling a 1000w from the wall to be honest i just have it because of sli requirements and power hungry CPU's i own

lx07 said:

Can it really? I thought AC meant it didn't matter and +ve and -ve wires were the same as they swapped 50 times a second or whatever. You don't have DC circuits in the states do you? I'm not an electrician obviously.

Yes, even with AC correct polarity can matter. Things where it may not matter is with resistive devices such as lamps. Modern wiring [required by building codes] in the US is 3 wire, positive, neutral and ground.

lx07 said:

Can it really? I thought AC meant it didn't matter and +ve and -ve wires were the same as they swapped 50 times a second or whatever. You don't have DC circuits in the states do you? I'm not an electrician obviously.

In theory you are correct - a particular AC device doesn't care if the polarity was switched.

However, there are practical wiring and safety concerns. For instance, in the US we get 240V household service but most appliances use 120V. To get 120V from 240V service we get a center-tapped neutral wire connected to earth ground - Split-phase electric power - Wikipedia - so that 120V appliances are connected to one hot wire and the neutral wire.

The neutral wire is connected to local ground so it is inherently safer than the hot. Many design decisions are based on that assumption. For instance, light switches always switch the hot wire - if the wiring were reversed and it switched the neutral, that means the lamp would still be connected to 120V even when switched off (but there would be no current flowing because the neutral is open). Also having reversed wiring would flip the phase by 180 degrees but most household appliances don't really care if they are out of phase.

Note that this is based on US electrical service - I don't know what it's like in the EU.

Bastet said:

Surge protectors often have red or green lights on them to shows protection is active, when the light goes dim that’s a warning to say the protection is failing & time to buy a new one.

I'm actually closing the Thread

I found out my wall socket wasn't grounding properly so i went and had it fixed i noticed it when the red light for not grounded flashed

So with that being said the problem wasn't the Surge protector it was the wall socket itself it must of gotten loose but what ever the case my Surge protector is running back to smooth green