I had two power boards daisy changed in my living room for my multiple devices etc., is it safer to have each power board plugged into a socket of the PowerPoint? (it’s a double socket) rather than daisy chaining from one to the other? or is it much of a muchness?
In: 4
Safer to use both sockets with a board on each. If you have four sockets on a board then, if you daisy chain them, you could have 7 appliances pulling power off a single wall socket. Whereas as separate boards each with their own wall socket you would only have 4 on each.
If they all pulled maximum power you could have a lot of power in the cable to the first daisy chained board. The more power you draw the hotter the wires get. The cable is designed to cope with the heat from the sockets it has on the board – not from multiple boards daisy chained. It probably won’t burst into flames before the fuse blows – but it might if it was a cheap board designed to minimum tolerances with no margin of safety.
Unless you are very certain that you are running only low wattage devices on all the sockets, it is recommended that you don’t daisy chain. The more available connections on one circuit spread out a distance and the more likely it is to forget what is plugged in.
If each “power board” (the technical terms in the US are “multitap” and “relocatable power tap”) has a circuit breaker that has been correctly designed, it shouldn’t be dangerous to daisy chain.
But workplace-safety regulations still say, “no,” because unfortunately there are a lot of crap products out there. And because regulations don’t always make sense.
Personally, I don’t care if all the devices are low-power and the multitaps are high quality.
Be careful about loose sockets. They can cause a fire even if the circuit breakers are correct.
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