In some office environments, I've seen red electrical outlets, usually
dedicated to computer equipment. What's different about these outlets?

A colored wallplate is often used to indicate the circuit is on a UPS
system, generator, or other filtered supply.

This helps prevent people from plugging refrigerators, coffee makers
etc onto them which helps prevent electrical interference on those
lines.

"Doug Kanter" wrote in message
...
In some office environments, I've seen red electrical outlets, usually
dedicated to computer equipment. What's different about these outlets?

In addition to the red as mentioned in the other replies, you may also come
across orange outlets, these have a dedicated ground wire that goes directly
to the panel. This is to keep noise out of sensitive electronics like you
would find in hospitals.

Kevin

"Kevin Ricks" wrote in message
t...

"Doug Kanter" wrote in message
...
In some office environments, I've seen red electrical outlets, usually
dedicated to computer equipment. What's different about these outlets?

In addition to the red as mentioned in the other replies, you may also
come across orange outlets, these have a dedicated ground wire that goes
directly to the panel. This is to keep noise out of sensitive electronics
like you would find in hospitals.

Kevin

This is sort of what I was wondering about: Noise. I play in a band, and
although I've mostly seen these red/orange outlets in offices, I ran across
just ONE box with red or orange plugs at a bar last week. Couldn't make out
the color in the bad light, from a distance in the audience. And, there were
just two plugs, so I suspect the place never expected to have more than a
solo act plugging in equipment.

Commodore Joe Redcloud© wrote:
On Wed, 04 Jan 2006 19:19:31 GMT, "Doug Kanter"
wrote:

In some office environments, I've seen red electrical outlets, usually
dedicated to computer equipment. What's different about these outlets?


Red outlets are ones which are attached to an emergency backup power
system.


Commodore Joe Redcloud©

Yes, and let me add a note from my own experience: at several hospitals
that I've worked at, the red outlets are fed from onsite generators
during grid outages, but the cutover is not instantaneous; when the
grid goes down you can expect the red outlets to be dead for some
number of seconds until the generators stabilize. Further, at one place
I worked, they "tested" the system one day each week at 07:00, which
involved a few seconds of outage as the red circuits were cut over to
the generators and then again a while later as they were switched back
to the grid. Apparently this is well-tolerated by the medical equipment
that's plugged into them (much of which I believe has integral battery
power, like a laptop does) but you can guess the effect this had on my
computers that I'd carefully made sure were all plugged into red
outlets. We soon had them on UPSs.

Chip C
Toronto

On Wed, 04 Jan 2006 19:19:31 GMT, "Doug Kanter"
wrote:

In some office environments, I've seen red electrical outlets, usually
dedicated to computer equipment. What's different about these outlets?

These are dedicated circuts. Usually supplied with power during
outages and most have surge and gfci's incorperated in them Anthony



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