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Pricey UPS Accessories

Former Community Member
Former Community Member
Hi there,


Long-time reader here posting for the first time. I quite enjoyed the discussion about audiophile fuses and while this isn't anywhere as ridiculous something seems off about the price of UPS power accessories.


I have just purchased a UPS for my home office having suffered some hard-drive damage from frequent 'brownouts'. This is an APC 1400va - 700 Watt with 6 x IEC C13 outputs at the back, enough to get me over the brief outages unscathed. As some of the devices being attached have a transformer I need a short extension from an IEC C14 to a BS 1363 Socket. So far so good and some air between the UPS and transformer is helpful.


I found them online at about £40 each which seems excessive when the component parts are readily available at a fraction of that cost. For example: https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/power-distribution-accessories/7794159/ Other UPS power accessories have similarly questionable markup.


My question is, can you folks see any reason why such a simple accessory is so expensive? For the life of me, I can't, so for the price of one of these, I plan to buy the parts to make six.


Now, I'm off to use the saving to buy a gold-plated plug for my stereo!


Neil





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  • Former Community Member
    0 Former Community Member

    kfh:

    I use many cheap adaptors and notice that most get quite warm on currents of less than 1/2 the design current. I have had a few 13A four ways fail (melt) when taking anything approaching 13A even for short durations.  So in a situation requiring reliability I would go for the more expensive branded option and hope they have just not made an excessive markup on the cheap dodgy import. 




    This is the point that maybe concerned me, that the conductor csa tends to be where the corner is cut in these accessories. While not technically undersized I would imagine some could use with a little derating to account for misuse that the general population can subject them to. 


    As for my own question, I will wire the UPS extensions up myself with a conductor csa that I am comfortable with, suitably fused, and I thank you for all your responses!

     

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  • Former Community Member
    0 Former Community Member

    kfh:

    I use many cheap adaptors and notice that most get quite warm on currents of less than 1/2 the design current. I have had a few 13A four ways fail (melt) when taking anything approaching 13A even for short durations.  So in a situation requiring reliability I would go for the more expensive branded option and hope they have just not made an excessive markup on the cheap dodgy import. 




    This is the point that maybe concerned me, that the conductor csa tends to be where the corner is cut in these accessories. While not technically undersized I would imagine some could use with a little derating to account for misuse that the general population can subject them to. 


    As for my own question, I will wire the UPS extensions up myself with a conductor csa that I am comfortable with, suitably fused, and I thank you for all your responses!

     

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