Before I hear any snarky “use the search bar”, I spent a good 20 minutes looking in the forums and elsewhere for an answer to no avail.
As I know, each pit is limited to only one power strip, and cannot use any splitters of any sort. Our new battery cart consists of 10 batteries on a dolly with 3 of the triple bank chargers (for a total of 3 12v plugs). The student’s grandfather that donated it included a 4-outlet surge protector for ease of connection, but I have a feeling we may not use it.
Now, would a surge protector, that stays INSTALLED on the cart, but control 3 12v plugs, legally count as a single plug for the entire pit?
My gut says no but my heart doesn’t want to tell the mentor that we can’t use the surge protector/outlet instead of running multiple wires to the cart.
As I thought, the 2017 rules do not have a rule concerning this so this will be left up to the individual venues on how much power each team is allowed in their pit.
We have a permanently installed 6 outlet surge protector on our battery cart that we use for charging batteries and any other power requirements we may have. Never had an issue at our venues to date.
So, officials walking past our pit could see the 24-outlet/15amp strip (Amazon.com) in our pit, and could have a say in us not using it? I don’t want to milk the 1-outlet-for-all idea, it’s just we have several low-power devices (eg. raspberry pi’s, monitors) that need plugging in.
Is that 6-outlet strip the only strip used in your pit?
All I’m telling you is that you need to ask this question to the venue you plan to compete at.
Bottom line, is that each pit is going to be limited to a certain current limit (likely 15 amps), if you exceed that limit you will trip the circuit breaker. If you continually trip the circuit breaker, officials will be seriously looking into what you are doing in your pit.