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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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  • 0

    Sparkingchip:

    My response to this was that I have some calibration check boxes and if I cannot check my own meters and be confident that I have shown that they are performing as required, then I should not be going out and testing electrical installations with them.




    Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Or in English, who calibrates your calibration check?


    If your meter gives a consistent reading over a period of time, it is most unlikely to be due to it becoming inaccurate precisely in step with your check box, so I agree that annual calibration checks are unnecessary. I think that we would all notice if a MFT was becoming unreliable. To my mind, for example, the exact value of an R1 + R2 test is usually unimportant, but we do want to confirm that it is close to what we expect. I have a fairly new SRCD in my workshop which allows me to monitor both RCD and Zs functions - quite handy for a banned device! ??

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  • 0

    Sparkingchip:

    My response to this was that I have some calibration check boxes and if I cannot check my own meters and be confident that I have shown that they are performing as required, then I should not be going out and testing electrical installations with them.




    Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Or in English, who calibrates your calibration check?


    If your meter gives a consistent reading over a period of time, it is most unlikely to be due to it becoming inaccurate precisely in step with your check box, so I agree that annual calibration checks are unnecessary. I think that we would all notice if a MFT was becoming unreliable. To my mind, for example, the exact value of an R1 + R2 test is usually unimportant, but we do want to confirm that it is close to what we expect. I have a fairly new SRCD in my workshop which allows me to monitor both RCD and Zs functions - quite handy for a banned device! ??

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