Power conditioners and power regeneration

The biggest fire danger is daisy-chaining cheap extension cords without fuses/breakers. That’s where your average home dweller or even office worker gets into trouble.

An outlet may provide 1800 W and those cheap extension cords, intended for lamps, may burn out after 600W. Try to daisy chain a few PC’s, printers, and a coffee machine and boom, fire.

Surge protectors want to be as close to the outlet as possible so that if they activate by shorting they dump as much current as possible through the home wiring. Any mediocre connections in between limit their effectiveness.

In addition, parallel mode surge protectors may short upstream components like other surge protectors, so having more than one surge protector in a chain is bad.

I get around all of this by:

• Using a voltage regulator that does not produce harmonics or noise and has a breaker
• Using Furman conditioners which have series mode (SMP) surge protection, and breakers
• Using hospital grade plug on the wall
• NOT using a UPS or regenerator

But like I mentioned, my gear was built up incrementally. If I had to do it again I'd have gone with the Furman with both voltage regulation AND power conditioning in one package.  

After reading everything, I’m still a little confused. How can you safely daisy chain a ups with a power conditioner?

Sorry, if you are referring to my example I’m not using a UPS with a power conditioner. I’m using a voltage regulator with power conditioners. The VR uses a switched transformer, and therefore has no high frequency harmonics. The VR does not offer perfect 120 Volts, but rather a range between 118 and 123 VAC. After this I use surge protectors which use primarily series mode protection so even if they should activate they won’t short.

A UPS has a built-in battery. A VR does not and won’t supply power when the power is out or bellow a certain range, say 100VAC. A UPS will engage when the output is out of the correct range, and that output, often intended for PCs, may be quite noisy. They do make sine wave UPS’s, but the noise is still there and based on reviews they tend to be much less reliable than their noisy brethren.

All the UPS vendors I am familiar with have built in surge protection, of various levels of quality.

The one case when you might have to use both, when you need surge protected outlets, and a UPS for other outlets, you should put the surge protector first, UPS second.

@classdstreamer There’s a couple of reasons for that. One is that UPS output often has a lot of harmonics which can trigger a surge protector, and most surge protectors use parallel protection which could short the UPS output. The other is the generalized fear of users putting low current extension cords downstream. The nightmare scenario which fire departments often have is a chain of unfused strips overloading. None of these issues apply to me.

You can get Furmans with both AR (automatic regulation) and surge protection (LiFT + SMP) , such as the P-1800 AR but in my case the voltage regulator ( https://amzn.to/3E5JesI ) is before the Furman Elite 15i. This wasn’t a great plan, but now I can keep my HT equipment on a different surge protector than my DAC/amplifier, and everything is voltage regulated.

Keep en eye out for open box deals, and know that Furman has made like 3 dozen models... so there’s a lot of other conditioners thave have these features (AR + Lift and SMP).

The reason I ended up with such a setup had to do with living in San Francisco and getting 130 VAC or higher regularly. The AVR has kept the voltage between 118 and 123 no matter what is playing or where I was.

Unfortunately my HT system shares an outlet with the porch and when the workers would start their circular saws the regulator kept engaging to keep the voltage at my equipment solid.

@oddiofyl - The rectification happens on the secondary of the transformer. Meaning it doesn’t "know" that the primary is balanced or not. It’s perfectly safe to use with tube gear.

Please keep in mind that whole-house surge protectors have high clamping voltages compared to the best point-of-use surge protection. About 600V vs. 200V. Whole-house suppressors are not intended to be the only surge protector in your home, especially for delicate electronics.  I've lost a laptop that way.

Having said that, tube gear by nature of the higher working voltages may be less susceptible to your average surge.

I only use Furman for my audio gear for surge protection.  I use a Furman voltage regulator upstream of the surge protection.  This gives me tight (5 VAC) voltage control along with excellent surge protection without the AC noise or expense of the regenerators.