Some of these units look yellowed and half-baked. In apartment electrical rooms I see many old surge protector power strips attached to the wall holding various small transformers and plugs for camera or intercom equipment. Many are 20 or more years old. Are they designed for long term use, essentially permanently attached? The transformers hide much of the receptacle openings. What can I tell the building owner so that these units are not fire bombs in disguise?
Electrical – Are surge protector power strips designed for long-term, mounted use
electrical
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Best Answer
Almost no electronic device lasts forever. Instead they have MTBF(Mean Time Before Failure), although if you reverse engineered a bunch of power bars, you would probably find some more robust and likely to survive much longer, you probably shouldn't count on any past their warranty. They are not likely to fail short and explode, it's more likely they will fail in such a way that the connected devices are not protected.
I'll just mention at this point that you can get system sized surge protectors if your boss is really worried about surges.
One thing you could do is go around and check the ratings of them and see what you can look up about each individual unit. No telling whether they are all surge protectors in the first place, what their protection ratings are, if they have any connected equipment warranty, whether it applies to commercial use, whether the warranty has expired.
By the time you've done an assesment you'll likely have enough information to say to your boss "Ok roughly 30% are ancient, 20% are power splitters not surge protectors, 45% are out of warranty and another 30% aren't sized well or warranty doesn't cover all connected equipment. I also found 2 of them that don't have regulatory markings (CSA(Canadian Standards Association) or UL(Underwriter's Lab) in Canada). There are 114 units in total, and we can do a bulk order of insert quality replacement for 22 currency each. Would you like to replace them?"