Let's Take a Trip Inside A Power Strip!

[Guest]

We count on power bars to protect our expensive PC hardware, and it's easy to take them for granted. Recently, one of our writers took an APC unit apart, though, and discovered some disturbing manufacturing work. Follow along as we dig into his findings.

Let's Take a Trip Inside A Power Strip! : Read more

 

[JuniorPCBuilder]

wow

 

[nukemaster]

Very surprised to see the inside of that(and I have 2 APC UPSs sitting in front of me.).

Also never though of using the de-soldering braid as a patch

 

[Onus]

It seems to me that it might be worthwhile taking a look at the innards of some more of these. This doesn't give me any warm fuzzies about APC. What happened to pride in one's products?

 

[Kevin Harrelson]

Having a fuse in addition to a breaker makes sense. A breaker takes milliseconds to react, being a mechanical device. If the fit really hits the shan, a fuse can react MUCH faster than a breaker.

 

[InvalidError]

What happened to pride in one's products?

Who knows. I'm sure most of this seemed like a good idea at the time.

For the soldering, they probably put the units through automated testing and as long as everything tests ok, they send the units on their way - the ATE probably tests the live and neutral wires at 20A and the neutral with 100A pulses so in principle, if the ATE says everything is fine, the visual inspection becomes somewhat superfluous... it may not be visually pretty but as far as electrical testing goes, it appears perfectly sound.

But I agree about expecting better out of APC on that one. As noted in the conclusion though, the unit with the blown trace had none of the soldering issues found in the tear-down unit so the "lack of pride" was at least not systematic.

 

[arunphilip]

This is probably the first slideshow style of article that I totally enjoyed. Great photos, great writing, very educative!

 

[edlivian]

i dont give a hoot about power savings anymore,intel has to start finding a way to gain 25% performance per cycle, or it will never become ideal to upgrade from sandy and ivy bridge i7's

 

[10tacle]

What happened to pride in one's products?

It went out the window when the manufacturing went overseas.

 

[qlum]

What happened to pride in one's products?

Who knows. I'm sure most of this seemed like a good idea at the time.

For the soldering, they probably put the units through automated testing and as long as everything tests ok, they send the units on their way - the ATE probably tests the live and neutral wires at 20A and the neutral with 100A pulses so in principle, if the ATE says everything is fine, the visual inspection becomes somewhat superfluous... it may not be visually pretty but as far as electrical testing goes, it appears perfectly sound.

But I agree about expecting better out of APC on that one. As noted in the conclusion though, the unit with the blown trace had none of the soldering issues found in the tear-down unit so the "lack of pride" was at least not systematic.

Still regardless of if it passes electrical testing a bad solder may just die over time when the device gets bumped, moved or just gets older. It may pass the test when it was made but 10 years ahead it may become a very different story. I can tell you I do use things like this for more then 10 years because there is no reason to replace when it does still work.

This does make me wonder how my € 3 hubs hold up on the soldering department.

 

[gm0n3y]

Still really dislike the slide-show layout for these articles, but other than that, this was actually really good. I didn't expect to see in-depth electronics articles like this on Toms.

 

[razor512]

Their quality has gone down. I remember from my old surge protector that the solder joints were good. Here is a picture:
https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2804/4448769179_decd009a6f_o.jpg

It looks like they are purposely ignoring this issue as electrical issues like that (especially with the soldering), cannot be overlooked, someone in the assembly process should spot those issues (company likely told them to ignore it)

 

[dmitche3]

Nice article. I have 4 APC UPSs in my house and if/when/should they go I'll be taking a closer look at them myself.

 

[Onus]

I too have some APC UPS units, although my PCs are all on Cyberpower APFC units because of the much better waveform; even my hypersensitive SG-650 is happy with those (it will cut out on an APC UPS).

 

[Dan Nelson]

Still really dislike the slide-show layout for these articles, but other than that, this was actually really good. I didn't expect to see in-depth electronics articles like this on Toms.

I always read articles on Tom's via the Print button; all pages coalesced into one for easy reading!

 

[kittle]

Neat idea for an "inside look" article.
Try doing the same for other popular surge protector brands. Also may be interesting to visit your local used parts store and get a couple older ones to see how they standup to the test of time.

I have 2 from monster power that are fast approaching 10yrs old. and others of indeterminate age.

 

[redgarl]

Interesting...

 

[Daniel Sauvageau]

Thanks for all the positive comments so far. I knew I would surprise people quite a bit with this sort of bare-metal picture story but I was still not expecting response to be this good.

I have sent a mail to APC requesting the modern version of the PF11 so I can do a follow-up story comparing the old with the new.

Raiding the local flea market to see if I can get a representative sample of what people might have out there and tear them apart is not a bad idea. I have a few generic bars myself but they all appear to be welded, which is not fun for tear-downs and I would not expect to see much in those. Then again, I was not expecting to spend nearly ten pages on unexpected assembly flaws and an unexpected failure between those two APC bars of mine either.

 

[Blaise170]

There is a good chance that this was just a bad unit. I seriously doubt that all of APC's surge protectors would look like this, otherwise they would not be as well known as they are for their UPS systems and surge protection systems. Something else to consider is that this unit is over 10 years old.

I'm not condoning their poor soldering job or anything else, but I think that unless all of their units look like this, cut them some slack. I've seen Seasonic power supplies that had bad soldering on them before, but does that make Seasonic a bad power supply company? No.

 

[Shin-san]

Wow. I have been buying APC's stuff for years. The stuff works well and their warranty is fantastic, but this worries me

 

[Daniel Sauvageau]

There is a good chance that this was just a bad unit.

As I noted in the conclusion, the unit I repaired did not have any of the poor solder jobs I saw in the unit I tore down for this story. It was probably the work of a new or tired employee and in this case, there could be dozens of units from batches that passed by that same employee on that day or week with similar issues.

Unfortunately for APC, one of those units happened to fall in the hands of someone who ended up making a picture story about it roughly a decade later. When you pick a subject for a story, you work with what you have and I happened to discover a handful of manufacturing defects in the power bar I picked for this story.

Unexpected discoveries keep things interesting.

 

[Daniel Sauvageau]

Wow. I have been buying APC's stuff for years. The stuff works well and their warranty is fantastic, but this worries me

I will probably do an APC UPS tear-down at some point... I might even do it with my vintage BX1000 if I get a green light on that from Adam.

 

[M C]

Using solder wick (or any other 'extra') can be effective, but I always dab a little 2-part epoxy after it is all finished in place and cleaned. This is to reduce the chances of it heating up and making its way across the other hot conductors.

 

[Daniel Sauvageau]

Using solder wick (or any other 'extra') can be effective, but I always dab a little 2-part epoxy after it is all finished in place and cleaned. This is to reduce the chances of it heating up and making its way across the other hot conductors.

Between the wick itself and the solder to stiffen it, the effective gauge is probably heavier than #14. Unless the mains' breaker fails while I have over 15A worth of loads plugged into it, that patch is not going to heat up much.

That said, I agree that tying/gluing things down is generally a good idea.

 

[GearUp]

Should a lamp be plugged into a APC UPS? My sole remaining incandescent bulb lamp caused loss of a USB connected TV tuner when switched off. It's been replaced by a new LED bulb, with no problems so far, but it is still a two prong plug.
The cold solder shown here changes my belief that larger is easier.