Self-Resetting Power Strips?
- by Justin Scott
We are about to deploy a number of secure kiosks into an environment where they may be prone to lightning strikes and power surges on a somewhat regular basis (southern Florida in a place where the existing electrical infrastructure is, shall we say, a bit out of date). Ideally we would use battery backups on each system, but it's not in the budget. We plan to use a standard power strip with a circuit breaker built-in to protect the computers, but management has asked if there is a power strip that can reset itself after the breaker has been tripped. I've looked around and wasn't able to find such a beast, and it seems to me that it would probably be a safety issue for such a product to exist (e.g. if something plugged into the strip is drawing a lot of current and trips the breaker, you wouldn't want that resetting itself to prevent a possible fire). Nevertheless, if anyone has experience with such a product or can point me in the direction of something that would allow the breakers to be reset automatically or remotely (we don't want to have to send someone to each kiosk every time there is a power surge) I would appreciate any tips.
