The complete guide
Choosing a Surge Protector for a Home Office
A home office runs out of sockets before it runs out of desk. Computer, two screens, a router, a printer, a lamp and a phone charger is seven plugs, and most rooms give you two. This guide covers what to look for in a surge protected extension lead, and what this one does and does not do.
Count your plugs first
Walk around the desk and count every mains plug: computer, each monitor, laptop charger, router, printer, lamp, speakers. Then count the things that charge from USB. Eight sockets and the USB ports cover most single-person home offices with room for one more thing later.
Look at the shape of the plugs as well as the number. Big plug-in chargers can cover the socket next to them, so put the bulky ones at the ends and the slim plugs in the middle.
What the surge numbers mean
A surge is a short spike in the mains voltage. Storms cause them, and so do big appliances switching on and off in the same house. Surge protection soaks up the spike before it reaches what is plugged in.
The joule rating tells you how much it can soak up. This one is rated at 1800 joules. Plenty of leads sold as surge protected never give a figure, which makes them hard to compare, so compare the joule rating first.
Two honest limits. No extension lead can stop a direct lightning strike, so in a bad storm unplugging the computer is still the safest option. And a surge protector uses up some of its protection each time it takes a hit, so replace it after a big one.
Never chain extension leads
Plug the lead straight into a wall socket. Do not plug it into another extension lead or an adaptor, and do not plug another lead into it. Everything on the lead runs through one plug and one fuse, so it cannot give you more power than the wall has. It only gives you more places to plug in.
Desk equipment rarely gets close to the limit. A heater, kettle or hair dryer can use most of it alone, so keep those on their own wall socket.
The USB ports
Two ports are USB-C at up to 3A each and two are USB-A at up to 2.4A each, with 3.1A shared across all four. That covers phones, earbuds and tablets without separate plugs. The USB-C ports will not charge a laptop that needs a higher-voltage charger, including MacBooks, so the laptop keeps its own charger in one of the sockets.
Use the two switches
Each switch runs one side of the lead. Put the router and anything that stays on all day on one side, and the screens, printer and lamp on the other. At the end of the day you switch off half the desk with one press. Two keyhole slots on the back let you hang the lead on a wall or under the desk to get it off the floor.
It is not a UPS
A surge protector keeps nothing running in a power cut. If your computer needs to stay on through an outage, or shut down cleanly, you need a UPS with a battery. Many people use both: the UPS for the computer, and a lead like this for everything else.