Power conditioners and power regeneration

Thanks for sharing links, Erik. I haven't come across voltage regulation gear aimed at the HiFi market other than the PS Audio power plants. It makes sense to me that "AR" would be useful for HiFi, not just the pro market. 

I use a UPS for my home network, and the UPS shows that my voltage is pegged at 120V with rare deviations here in Dallas. So I'm not certain I'd benefit from AR gear.

I do like how you've daisy-chained Furman components together to reach your desired feature set. 

Having read all the reviews I can, have ordered a Puritan PSM156.

Suits all my needs.

After reading everything, I’m still a little confused. How can you safely daisy chain a ups with a power conditioner? 

After reading everything, I’m still a little confused. How can you safely daisy chain a ups with a power conditioner?

Sorry, if you are referring to my example I’m not using a UPS with a power conditioner. I’m using a voltage regulator with power conditioners. The VR uses a switched transformer, and therefore has no high frequency harmonics. The VR does not offer perfect 120 Volts, but rather a range between 118 and 123 VAC. After this I use surge protectors which use primarily series mode protection so even if they should activate they won’t short.

A UPS has a built-in battery. A VR does not and won’t supply power when the power is out or bellow a certain range, say 100VAC. A UPS will engage when the output is out of the correct range, and that output, often intended for PCs, may be quite noisy. They do make sine wave UPS’s, but the noise is still there and based on reviews they tend to be much less reliable than their noisy brethren.

All the UPS vendors I am familiar with have built in surge protection, of various levels of quality.

The one case when you might have to use both, when you need surge protected outlets, and a UPS for other outlets, you should put the surge protector first, UPS second.

The biggest fire danger is daisy-chaining cheap extension cords without fuses/breakers. That’s where your average home dweller or even office worker gets into trouble.

An outlet may provide 1800 W and those cheap extension cords, intended for lamps, may burn out after 600W. Try to daisy chain a few PC’s, printers, and a coffee machine and boom, fire.

Surge protectors want to be as close to the outlet as possible so that if they activate by shorting they dump as much current as possible through the home wiring. Any mediocre connections in between limit their effectiveness.

In addition, parallel mode surge protectors may short upstream components like other surge protectors, so having more than one surge protector in a chain is bad.

I get around all of this by:

• Using a voltage regulator that does not produce harmonics or noise and has a breaker
• Using Furman conditioners which have series mode (SMP) surge protection, and breakers
• Using hospital grade plug on the wall
• NOT using a UPS or regenerator

But like I mentioned, my gear was built up incrementally. If I had to do it again I'd have gone with the Furman with both voltage regulation AND power conditioning in one package.