Was on sale in February for $16, so for those holding out for a better deal, here it is!
wisepage has uploaded a deal with a 8-Outlet USB Powerboard (one word?), but these are individually-switched, if that means more to you. https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/765178
Can you provide more info on what way they all failed? Just stopped turning on? Some parts stopped working? Caught fire?
Sure.
The powerboard still works, but has really loud coil whine. It was so loud that I could hear it above the TV at a reasonable volume.
The sensor light LED panel failed.
The sensor for lights completely failed and no longer has any power.
The two lights were about 4 months old, and the powerboard was about 1 year old.
coil whine? does it have usb outlets?
I'd hope you return them all and get the money back.
I mean to be fair they are made to a price and usually even the next cheapest at Bunnings (typically hpm) are not that much better haha
Which is not an excuse for not working.
I don't get the logic where devices like this are expected to fail. It's a product with a purpose and it's meant to work, no matter the price.
If everyone kept their receipts and return their faulty items, perhaps we'd see less crap on the market.
I work in manufacturing, specifically some fairly high end and complex machines - I can tell you components fail. There are uncertainties and errors in manufacturing processes across the entire supply chain that cannot be eliminated entirely. They can be reduced to be statistically insignificant with enough investment but even still you cannot expect 100% of everything to work 100% of the time indefinitely.
When you manufacture something to be the cheapest on the market, that almost always comes at the cost of quality and reliability. Therefore the expectation and likelihood of failure is naturally higher.
@Harold Halfprice: I gather you are saying if it's cheap, the consumer should automatically assume it's rubbish and not buy it. I guess that would be fine if price alone was a good indicator of quality. It's not that simple: expensive doesn't mean good IME.
Rather than defending race to the bottom tactics (as you seen to be), we should be looking at ways to improve reliability of products to reduce waste etc, customer inconvenience. Perhaps forcing products to list mean time to failure or minimum warranty periods might help. Allowing the consumer to make more educated decisions about purchases might actually allow Australian and other manufacturers a little more wiggle room to produce a quality product at a higher price. I wonder if by defending Arlec and trying to persuade people that producing cheap and nasty products is fine you are actually making it harder for businesses to bring a decent product to market.
I don't mind paying more for quality, it's just really hard/time consuming to work out which products are good every time I want to buy something. E.g. Supposedly reputable manufacturers don't back their products with decent warranty periods which leaves you wondering why. In the end, it's often easier/less risky to roll the dice on cheap.
Edit: having said the above, I recognise that Australia is a small market and forcing manufacturers to list MTTFs or provide longer warranty might just make them give up on the Australian market. Still, don't think we need to defend them for producing crap.
I gather you are saying if it's cheap, the consumer should automatically assume it's rubbish and not buy it
No, I'm saying that if it's cheap - you should understand that the liklihood of failure and long term reliability is lower. That is the trade off you make. You're arguing that there's no excuse for something to fail - but the reality is there is and as a consumer you have options. You're not forced to buy the cheap stuff if you don't want to, but you have the option to if you want.
It's not that simple: expensive doesn't mean good IME.
I didn't say expensive means good or reliable. Something can be expensive for a plethora of reasons other than quality and reliability.
The point is, this is literally bottom of the market. And when you are manufacturing something to be cheap you cannot also maintain high quality and reliability standards.
High quality and reliability costs money - that's a cost that will get passed onto the consumer. At my work, we have high quality components that come to us faulty from time to time, but we implement processes to catch them before our end product makes it to the customer (even then, it's not fool proof and things fail prematurely). We work with the suppliers to identify what went wrong and help them improve their manufacturing process. This requires a significant amount of resources - it's a huge cost, and it's our customer's who pay for it at the end of the day.
Regardless, there is clearly a market for low cost cheap shit. I'm generally of the "buy once, cry once" mindset - but there are situations where long term reliability isn't required or the price premium isn't justified.
@Harold Halfprice: I think that if we both could be bothered to chat this out we would find that positions aren't too far apart but life is too short!
I agree with a lot of what you are saying (can't have cheap and good, although Ozito isn't terrible for eg?) but I think you should be able to walk into a shop with the expectation that a product will work for a reasonable length of time. That should be the default. If the Arlecs of the world want to market something cheap and nasty as cheap and nasty, fine, the consumer makes a conscious decision to role the dice on cheap. But, that's not the case and the buyer has to be very savvy to pick the right product from all the marketing spin and lies. This probably isn't great for market confidence but I'm no economist.
I look forward to a time where companies are penalised/discouraged through some mechanism for producing cut-corner products that are destined for landfill shortly after sale. Until then, good quality manufacturers will get squeezed between high costs and low sale prices of competitors that have little/less pride or morals.
It's… clearly bottom of the barrel cheap shit. It's almost as bad as buying from unknown vendors on Aliexpress. The savings that you make on it being cheap is a tradeoff against the increased probability that it'll crap out.
Return it. Let them pay for the cost of shoddy QC.
I'm using Arlec powerboards (without dumb useless crap like surge 'protection') simply 1) because there are no electronics to fail, just simple bits of copper and 2) because I am waiting to replace them with something better (again, without fake crap like surge 'protection')
Return it. Let them pay for the cost of shoddy QC.
Exactly!
I understand this is how industry works (re Harold's comment above) and my point is: get rid of those dodgy manufacturers that lure us into crap for which "likelihood of failure is naturally higher".
Never made a mistake at work?
Everything fails at some point.
Everything fails at some point.
Yeah, that's a profoundly wise line, but we're talking failing prematurely here.
Which brand do you recommend instead?
Belkin but wait till it goes on proper sale which seems to happen at least 4-5 times a year
Do you live in a house or apartment? Sounds like your house got a surge.
I would think if 3 devices failed together, something must have happened for they all fail together.
Exactly that was my first thought. It normal for an apartment to swap surge protectors every 6 months especially if you got a lot rental tenants overloads the building.
It normal for an apartment to swap surge protectors every 6 months especially if you got a lot rental tenants overloads the building.
Is this statement based on some kind of electronics/electrician background or just random?
I have lived in apartments all my life (other countries generally) and this has not been an issue. I generally run the same tech gear for 5+ years with the expectedly low failure rates. I've never even had power bars with surge protection until moving here, because surge protection is actually kind of hard to avoid buying. And even then, the supposed surge protection in bars here give no indication of whether they need replacing.
Unless there is something special and substandard about Australian power grids, this is a very surprising statement.
@rumblytangara: Apartment standing over 10 years already don’t have enough outlets per room. If you live in apartment over 50 apartments, overloading the building is pretty common that’s why most lifts go out.
If you live near major infrastructure changes I.e light rail. Powerlines would be cut regularly and have large variables in draws from the grid given what is being used.
@Sheng: I would expect that the lifts would run on totally separate 3 phase circuits than what people are running to their wall sockets.
I come from a city where 200 units per building is totally normal. Surge protection power bars were almost impossible to find on the market.
a lot rental tenants overloads the building.
Overloading the mains does not cause surges, it causes brownouts, and surge protectors won't stop those. Brownouts won't normally affect electronic devices either, as almost all electronic devices are designed to run from any voltage in the 110V-240V range. However things with motors (e.g. the compressor in your fridge) often won't start at the lower voltage, and then you can be in real trouble.
If your neighbours are doing arc welding, that will cause spikes. And of course lightning can cause spikes - is your apartment building one of the tallest buildings in the neighbourhood, or do you live on top of a hill? You'll have more lightning strikes if so.
Note that lightning doesn't have to directly strike your building to cause a surge, it can strike an overhead power line a few hundred metres away and still cause dangerous surges at your property.
happened at my mums house and mine
These are basic power boards with no surge protection, no USB ports, no LEDs, it is more like extending your power outlet on the wall. Which is why I prefer these boards over the cheap boards with slow USB charging ports or awful surge protection. Get a basic board, then plug in one of the USB charger ports separately as when USB technology changes, your board is still a valid product.
oops, was just about to buy some….
did all 3 fail on the same wall outlet/devices?
Nope
FWIW, I've had 6 Arlec Boston DC Fans installed at my house. They have all been working as expected since 2019.
YMMV
wisepage has uploaded a deal with a 8-Outlet USB Powerboard (one word?)
I can confirm one of the differences between the Arlec products in question is spelling.
Best to pay extra and get the belkin boards as they have surge protection. All mine are now belkin
I always buy quality australian electricity to reduce the chance of surges
Belkin rep told me years ago, they are not going to protect you from a large surge like a lightning strike, it is more like paying for additional insurance. A power board costs Belkin less that $5 to produce and get to the stores, the other $45+ you pay is there insurance cover, for if the attached products die during a surge and you can prove that it was their product that failed they pay out but if you can't prove it, they don't have to pay out. Well, that is how the rep explained it to me 10+ years ago.
Regarding surge protection, depending on where you live, affects how necessary they are. If you live in an area with a lot of homes, power surges will dissipate across the multitude of homes in your area and very unlikely to cause an issue to you. Buy high quality surge protectors if you have lots of storms in your area, if you live in a rural area, if you are using them in an industrial building with large machinery operating, or your wiring is really shit in which case you should get that fixed first.
Do the Belkin boards alert you once the surge protection stops working? My understanding is that these things have a finite capacity.
All the cheap garbage boards like Arlec, ControlTech, etc, don't indicate anything.
I honestly don't understand the obsession with surge protection boards in Australia (at least in metro areas). I've lived pretty much all over the world, and the only places that I've seen bad power was parts of the US, and in bits of Africa (where you wanted full UPS, not some crappy surge protection built into a little power board). Surge protected boards are a big thing here, and nowhere else where I have lived.
I just spent $1500 on just a graphics card and power supply for work on top of an already expensive PC, so am pretty keen to find some sort of even basic surge protection to try to protect that.
@CodeExplode: My wireless access point alone is more expensive than that graphics card.
I see no reason to buy a (mostly useless, and does-not-indicate-when-dead) surge protector to it.
I've been in tech for literally decades. For serious stuff, we use datacentres with rock solid redundant power distribution. For office buildings we use online UPS. For home… we use decent power boards and or UPS and never kid ourselves with 'surge protection' from shitty electrical brands.
If you're seriously worried, get an APC UPS.
@rumblytangara: Yeah I was considering an UPs. I live in a pretty old house with a lot of lightning storms and which is surrounded by huge trees right over the roof. Worse my housemate has an obsession with buying broken washing machines etc which some days just won't turn on, and it feels like a problem waiting to happen.
@rumblytangara: I'm curious about the wireless access point that you use. How is it better than a $100 out there?
Thanks.
@Averell: For most people, there's no difference tbh.
For me, there's a load of data about what devices are connected at what signal strengths, power supplied by Ethernet cables rather than DC wall warts for ceiling mount, long term firmware support, higher levels of hardware reliability. For stuff that don't need, the APs are supposed to support over a thousand concurrent connections and have dynamically adjusting channels.
Current consumer stuff is probably faster and easier to set up. I don't really need either.
Ruckus R720s and Ruckus R610s.
Link to the ones you have?
Any recommendations for extension? Happy to pay extra for good quality product
Multuple suggestions and recommendations in the comments posted now above yours.
Arlec 4
how does this compare to the Jackson 5 ?
Something something child safety.
I wish their onepass limit was lower
Bought some:
Some had switches mounted the wrong way.
If using them with cheap import power packs contacts get intermittent.
Some are hard to unplug.
You get what you pay for.
All failures were on the white ones. The ones in black so far have not failed.
Racist QA
No chlorine in the plastic: More stable!
Soon on ABC: The new V O I C E !
If using them with cheap import power packs contacts get intermittent.
Some are hard to unplug.
I had some Arlec double adaptors like that, so I took one apart. It didn't have spring contacts! Just a slot in the conductor, which deformed ever so slightly when a plug was inserted. I used vernier calipers to measure the plugs I was having trouble with, and the ones with intermittent contact were ever so slightly thinner.
It was bad design on the part of Arlec, but they do make some reasonable stuff. Now I always take a pocket flashlight when shopping for power boards and double adaptors, and shine the torch down the sockets. If I can see spring contacts that are touching, I'll buy. If I see metalwork that doesn't touch together, reject.
It's not only Arlec that make crappy products, I had a Mistral powerboard that was deadly. The transparent orange cover over the illuminated power switch broke off, showing that the neon bulb was touching the cover, and had live wires exposed! You'd think they'd put the bulb lower in the switch, and let it shine up through a light pipe or similar, but no. Made as cheaply (and deadly) as possible.
I'm about to head out to look for more power boards now. I'll take a torch :)
Stupid power boards have security screws on the back holding them together, I haven't been able to take them apart to check for construction quality.
Stupid power boards have security screws on the back holding them together
Agreed, it's a problem. I've found that hex keys/bits work to undo most tri-wing screws, but I've also seen a few powerboards with screws that need a snake-eye bit to undo them. And then they put the screw head at the bottom of a narrow tube, so you can't use a standard snake-eye bit, you need the long-shank version.
At least we can be glad they're not glued together.
Yeap all the cheap extension boards now a days are just some brass strips that makes loose contact with plugs. Very cheap and nasty.
Overload protection ✅
Surge protection ❌
USB ports ❌
It's been at this price online for a while now. My local only had black in stock which were both advertised and scanned at $18, but the staff member was happy to sell them for $14 after I showed them the white at $14 on my phone.
dang, i should have posted this. i bought it 1-2 weeks ago. i thought that was just normal price.
Is surge protection same as their description "safety overload protection"?
Also if surge is not that important as some have commented above - then is being individually switched enough of a positive to replace all powerboards in the home?
Pls confirm/deny cheers
I think they are different. Overload protection is what kicks in when you plug two water kettles in and turn both of them on. This surge protection is something more fuzzy to me.
Is surge protection same as their description "safety overload protection"?
No. The name is self explanatory. Surge protection protects devices from electrical surges eg. Lightning strikes. Overload protects the powerboard from blowing up when too many devices are drawing too much power so it cuts off the power to the powerboard.
Also if surge is not that important as some have commented above
Some say that this feature doesn’t actually work for massive electrical surges like lighting strikes but because it’s an insured device it will be covered for damages if you can prove the device failed to do so.
New houses with modern switch boards will do most of the surge protection anyway
Some say that this feature doesn’t actually work for massive electrical surges like lighting strikes
It's true, there's only so much energy that the surge protection can absorb.
A few years ago I was given a failed powerboard to inspect, and the lead of the MOV (the surge-absorbing component) had burned trough, and left large black deposits on the inside of the white plastic case. It didn't protect the plugged-in devices.
TL;DR. Your house wiring and switchboard are as important or more important than sone cheap power boards. Get your wiring and switchboard up to spec first. But I still wouldn’t buy cheap power boards and I discourage it for all the reasons I listed below. That being said I hope there is something useful in my long post that helps out someone. Whether you are buying or renting if it doesn’t have an RCD, it shouldn’t be available to rent, pretty sure that’s against code in most states and if you are buying allow enough extra to redo all your electrical wiring, including your telco wiring.
If you have expensive gear to protect an online UPS gives you AC>DC>AC conversion and will give you a pure sine wave. That being said the point of MOVs is to burn out but get enough voltage through them the voltage is most likely to arc across the small space and while they will try to burn out, the high voltage is going to jump over the small space at the same time as MOVs are trying to burn out. A power board that’s been hit by a high enough surge shouldn’t work at all as the connections between the power and the plug should have all burnt out.
Also note that if you are buying a board without the specifics of insurance on the packaging and you can’t find anything on the website, there probably is no insurance! Your own Home and contents insurance will likely have to cover whatever you lost to damage. Power companies that cause a massive surge by re-energising a transformer going haywire and feeding in 11kV into your single phase 240 volt lines you would hope the MOV and other components will die first. They are designed to do that.
Worked in an factory building with offices in the 1990s maybe 10KM from the centre of Melbourne had a liightning strike, and based by the volume of the thunder either right next to us or within a 100m radius. All surge protected power boards burnt out but only three actually protected any gear connected yet they were all the same brand!
That’s when that company bought a it’s first online UPS and back then they were killer expensive. Not that they are cheap today. But the point of a lot of power protection gear is to burn out and die to save whatever is plugged into it - but as has been pointed out and as I mentioned enough voltage will arc right across the air gap left and hit your components anyway. I’d rather lose gear to a $1500 online UPS than a $40-$60 power board. Having said that, if you can switch off your major appliances if you know power company is doing work in the area snd just leave a light turned on in that situation is good practice the re-energising of a lot of the older gear on electrical distribution often will cause spikes.
Depending on the state you live in and the age of the suburb. There can be huge inrush voltage and current which can just as easily kill your gear.
The power companies should be replacing pole mounted transformers, not waiting for them to fail and then patch them up - alas in Victoria with five electricity suppliers splitting the state into five separate supply areas some of o those wholesale suppliers are more active at upgrading their network’s gear.
I digress fir a moment: Seeing footage of the recent Victorian floods where water was already at the sandbag level at substations - if it gets into the switch box room, most of which, especially in rural and regional areas are 50-60 years old things are not fun. The might be able to isolate the power surge from spreading depending on the design but they don’t have back up units.
If they can keep the water out of the substation great, that going offline will probably take a chunk of the town with it and will require weeks of work to fix.
Same with the stupid design of NBN Nodes which have all their battery backup at the bottom and passive ventilation vents at 600mm from ground level I’ve seen two guys spend 3-4 days replacing just about everything inside the cabinet but they are only 1200 metres apart so maybe some ppl are lucky if the node is higher up from where water runs but typically they take some damage and being telco they have quite large surge suppressors between the power and the rest of the electronics but they were and always will be a stupid choice for a country that gets as many floods as we do. Btw, they were supposed to be in 800 metre overlapping concentric circles but someone cut corners.
Modern transformers in newer estates with unground power, which I’m fortunate enough to live in, I eith have power or I don’t - none of this losing a phase rubbish that I used to get from AusNet Services for years at one house I rented in the Eastern auburns iof Melbourne.
Powercor who has the entire Western part of Victoria and 150-200KM west of me in Bendigo in Central Victoria they get done doozy electrical storms. Powercor had been telling heaps of people they can’t install or upgrade their solar as their old transformers can’t handle all the extra load running through it.
This is what privatisation does to you - you end up with electricity wholesalers while connected to the Eastern Australian Electrical distribution Grid, but their own gear to which most people pay on their electrical bills, anything from $1-$2 dollars a day for connect charges to their network - it’s not fair that areas just in the western suburbs of Melbourne can’t get solar is large parts of Powercor’s entire area that have restrictions on solar. Unless that is slowly being addressed. However I’d be surprised if that has changed.
Instead of dragging up most of the electricity from LaTrobe Valley where all the coal fired power stations are, there is a large lithium ion battery being built not far from Geelong for peak load and was just about completed before they had thermal runaway in one of their battery packs and caused a fair amount of damage.
I am hoping to see a lot more mini solar farms with large battery packs supplementing or even replacing and entire town or city’s grids - I know they have at least one planned for Bendigo and some of the smaller towns around here. I’m not saying Albo’s idea of completely rebuilding the Eastern Grid and maybe the rest of Australia as well, isn’t good, it’s great, but why didn’t they do it sooner as it’s going to take 20-30 years because of all the interconnected lines.
But back to my original point and I digress again because I’ve been sick - I just invested $400 into new power boards for the entire house and I was staggered by the lack of information I could get.
I wanted individual switches and surge protection would be nice. Have always had it on my computer gear and my HT gear but fortunately I haven’t lost anything yet. Touch wood.
But more and more companies are removing individual switches from each socket. Not even a master switch.
There have been so many records of electrical fires from dust getting into cheaper power boards and causing a short.
Most of Australia has had overload switches on power boards in AU for at least 40 years, maybe longer.
If you don’t have an RCD at all, save up and get one! The cost of rewriting your old switchboard if it’s an older house is probably equivalent to the cost of t two years’ of Home and Contents insurance.
Older house yet your wiring replaced! If you put your head into the roof cavity and see that old brown electrical cable, there’s a good chance it’s worn somewhere.
Doing telco work in the past I hated working in roofs of old houses, so many electrical hazards.
You can try to protect your new gear in an old house but IMHO protecting your brand new gear if the wiring in your house is old and you are still on ceramic fuses and not circuit breakers then step up and spend the money, get your telco wiring replaced if that’s old as well, at the same time. Labour is the big cost so get sone fixed quotes and make it a priority please!
I’ve been hit by 240V enough times, probably less than five, and I’ve been lucky, nothing more than a shock, always use the back of your hand if you are touching a wire that could be live, if it is, that will cause your muscles to contract and pull your hand away.
Basic electrical safety should be taught in schools if it isn’t and at an appropriate age and then again - I’ve lost two friends to death by electrocution and both of them knew what they were doing.
But on the power boards I agree, I really like the torch idea though power boards, but most retail ones are often stored in shiny plastic packaging so can be hard to see into sockets.
IMHO Bunnings shouldn’t be selling rubbish product because the people who know the least are likely to buy them and if you can afford yo buy replacement power boards with individual switches which is becoming much less common.
Or, turn them on their side or fill empty sockets with those child proof plugs and fit them to any facing upwards that could gather dust.
I cannot stress the importance of an RCD though, they’ve been pushing them since the late 80s and yes I am that old Ceramic fuses are easily changed with circuit breakers but if your main power board has no RCD it will probably need sone rewriting. Any family with young kids should have checked their power board as a pre-requisite on rental or buying check list. Those rentals probably all need RCDs - depends on state legislation.
If you love the house but the wiring is old include enough money to rewire the entire place, put in new sockets, if there are Bakelite light switches you can buy modern versions, you can get shocked just from wet hands on those things.
I cannot stress the importance of good wiring and a good switchboard with one or more which is the standard on each circuit,
Once all that is fixed, then go nuts with whatever power boards take your fancy but these cheap Arlec ones at Bunnings I don’t think I wouldn’t touch and wouldn’t recommend anyone else to get them either.
There’s been a bunch of sensible chat on this post, that people shouldn’t buy cheap power boards - alas sone people will anyway.
I can only discourage the practice.
Sorry for long post, need a TL;DR.
Cheers.
If you plug your devices into the wall socket you are not getting any additional protection, these cheap power boards are more like an extension to the wall sockets rather than anything else. I prefer these over the cheap Power Surge protection devices that give a false sense of protection. Some surge protectors will keep working after they have failed and show a red light to indicate that it has died, so if you aren't checking on the light on those tucked away behind a cabinet, you may think that you are protected when you are aren't. Many surge protectors don't protect against high surges, such as lightning strikes as they don't disable quickly enough, if they even disable at all. If your devices die while attached, you then have to prove it was the surge protector that failed that caused your devices to die, if you can't prove it, they don't pay out, so you paid more for your surge protector, but didn't get the insurance cover anyway.
I reckon high quality surge protectors and UPS are a good choice if you have devices that need protecting, otherwise, just don't bother with surge protection. I haven't and I haven't needed one at home so far. Small spikes in power generally increase the the operating temperature of components in the power supply for a nano second or two and does nothing to the device, a surge protector though would lose some of its life span, meaning it you need to pay again to replace it despite it not saving your devices from any damage. A large surge for an extended period of time can trip breakers preventing damage to your devices, it can blow fuses you can replace, or it could damage products it is connected too, though they could be power supplies that can be replaced. I'd rather have good wiring at my home, fuses on plugs, and not worry about power surge protectors. I get cheap power boards and then I get a decent USB charging HUB.
FWIW, I have had 3 Arlec devices fail this week.
A 12 port powerboard.
A sensor for lights.
And a light with a sensor built in. Personally, I am going to steer clear of them from now on.