Surge protection question

[surfivor]

 A friend of mine lives in a house that his brother own and rents and there is something like 12 units in the house with other people living in it. He has expensive music gear and recording equipment in his unit.

There are some crazy people that live there that are apparently irrational and I don't want to go into the details on that. What happens occasionally is those people have gone into the basement and have been switching circuit breakers on and off because something happened with their toaster or whatever. This can cause power surges in his music gear to make them go back on and off etc and could damage expensive music equipment.

 My friend has gotten into fights with these people but it seems unproductive. I was wondering if there is some kind of affordable smart surge protection power strip that would cost something like $200 or less ? It would work like this: when the power goes off, it then stays off until you manually turn it back on using your local power strip ? That way if someone flipped the circuit breakers in the basement several times turning the power off and on several times, it would not do that to your equipment but instead it would just stay off until you turned it on. If there is not something commercially available, perhaps someone could build something like that that would not cost too much ?

 We talked about putting locks on the basement door but other people need to get into the basement or need access to the power. If he locks the door then someone may wake him up at 7:00 AM which he considers a major downside.

[surfivor]

I am seeing that the thing to use may be an active non latching RCD. I don't understand why when I google those, most all of the are sold out of the UK and the price is listed in UK pounds ?

https://www.fastlec.co.uk/blog/2009/12/tips-and-resources/latching-and-non-latching-rcd-sockets.html

[Carver]

The obvious solution would be to put a lock on the service panel. A properly functioning toaster will not trip a breaker. If they have problems an electrician should inspect. No renter should have access to any utility controls under any circumstance. This doesn't sound like an electrical problems but a renter problem. I would seek legal consultation.

[surfivor]

The obvious solution would be to put a lock on the service panel. A properly functioning toaster will not trip a breaker. If they have problems an electrician should inspect. No renter should have access to any utility controls under any circumstance. This doesn't sound like an electrical problems but a renter problem. I would seek legal consultation.

Yea probably, but some of these people sound a bit standoffish, crazy or actually kind of very uncooperative with bad attitudes. Our state apparently has laws that heavily favors renters and kicking people out is not easy. The legal aspects and all that seems complex and I would be at a loss possibly to advise on what to do.

Also, if there is a lock on the box then he thinks people may have to bother him early in the morning or at odd times

My thought was that if you can work around it for $200 or something, maybe it would be worth it to avoid the hassle of taking action. My friend doesn’t own the building, his brother does so I don’t know how easy it is to resolve and especially if the brothers level of interest in the dispute is not particularly strong etc

[cidyl]

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Tower-Manufacturing-Corporation-2-ft-In-Line-GFCI-Triple-Tap-Cord-Manual-Reset-30396028-08/202510258

"Manual reset feature requires the user to turn “On” after power interruption"

Search on GFCI and "manual reset" to find others.

[Carver]

"My friend doesn’t own the building, his brother does so I don’t know how easy it is to resolve and especially if the brothers level of interest in the dispute is not particularly strong etc" That puts the final touch on an unresolvable problem. We know of a apartment with 8 units all on the same water meter. When one apartment got new tenants the water usage doubled and when they left it went back to what it was. Nothing could be done about it while they were there.

[never_retreat]

Install these on His breakers. Breakers trip internally so it is not a safety issue. These are commonly used to keep important circuits from being off like fire alarms.