Early this year, around February or so, I bought an old, used 48U network rack, which I set up in my living room for home use. This rack has a power strip mounted on the side with an L5-30P plug, intended for a 30A circuit. I used an adapter to convert this to a standard plug for a regular outlet. I plugged the adapter into a Belkin BE108000-08-CM surge protector (8ft, 8 plugs, 2500J). I plugged the Belkin into a Kill-A-Watt meter (measures amperage), which in turn was plugged into the wall. The Belkin I bought brand new at the same time I bought the rack. I know daisy chaining power strips/surge protectors is not usually recommended, but I wanted to use the power strip already mounted in the rack and wanted surge protection on that strip, so I wasn’t sure of a better way to do this. In the rack I had: 3 PCs, modem, router, and a fan. I was watching amperage usage with the kill-a-watt meter, which never exceeded 3.5A even when PCs were stressed.
One day I came home from work (this was 4 months ago now) and found all 3 PCs were off. It was not a power outage because other devices in the home were unaffected (digital clocks elsewhere in the home still had the correct time). I turned the PCs back on, but two of them now have damaged PSUs and/or motherboards. I haven’t tracked down for sure whether it is PSU or motherboard damage, but clearly both PCs were damaged that day. I am intending to replace both PCs, but before I sink the money into it I want to understand what happened so that I can prevent the new PCs from becoming damaged as well. I had 3 PCs in the rack, but only 2 were damaged. The undamaged one is ancient, from 2009, and I found that it was drawing 1.6A even when idle. I have since removed it from the rack in case it was somehow part of the problem, which has lowered the rack’s amperage to <2A.
It is suspicious to me that this happened only a couple months after putting everything in the rack, and also suspicious that nothing in my home was affected except for the rack. So really I have a few questions:
- Does anyone know what might have caused the damage?
- Is there anything wrong with my setup?
- Is the wall->belkin->power strip setup ok in my situation, where I am only using a few amps at most?
- Is it necessary, important, or recommended to have a UPS? Am I fine without one?
- Is it possible that a device in my rack (such as one of the PC power supplies) caused a “local” power surge to other devices in the rack? Is there such a thing?
- Is there some amperage I should be careful to stay below? Should I be careful adding more devices or PCs to the rack in the future?
