Is it dangerous? [switching off power strip at wall]

Elektron Gear
#21

I have a number of Elektron boxes together with a couple of other synths all hooked up to a single power strip. All of these devices have power switches on the back. Would it be safe to keep all of those power switches on all the time and only turn on and off my machines using the switch on the power strip?

The reason I’m asking is that I did this for a while and experienced a problem with my Syntakt not powering up for a while. I have no idea if it was related, but it scared me enough to stop doing it.

#22

i would think that it would be fine. the machines seem to loose power instantly with the switch, there should be no difference between loosing power at the switch or at the supply if your using the factory power supplies.

#23

That’s my thinking as well. However, when I turn on the machines with their own power switches, I’m doing so in a serial order rather than having all of them come on at once.

#24

are you using a surge protector or a power strip? some surge protectors hold something like a residual charge as part of the fail safe mechanism because it’s usually for a pc which can lose data if it’s improperly shut down. I don’t specifically know how it would affect your current situation, but elektron devices don’t have a shut down cycle, they have an off switch. even if they come on at the same time unless there is insufficient power delivery I can’t imagine it would change anything in the load process…

#25

This sounds right to me. In contrast to the rocker switch on the Digi boxes (and the flagships, I presume) the Models have a little “shutting down” thing that happens when you hold the power/volume knob; I wonder if that’s actually doing anything (like saving the current device state) or if the progress bar is just to show that you need to keep holding the knob to turn it off.

1 Like
#26

:thinking: I also wonder

#27

It’s a power strip with a surge protector built in I believe. There’s a small red button that you have to reset if it ever activates.

#28

I think the solution is power down the syntakt first before you turn off the power strip, power on the syntakt last in the start up after turning on the power strip if that’s the only one which is affected by your process. don’t make trouble where there is none, right?

#29

That’s exactly what it’s doing. It’s saving the most recent state of the loaded project. So if you have made changes on multiple patterns or changed the project config, and you have not saved those changes, removing the power wipes out the changes, whereas the proper power down preserves those changes so they get automatically restored on power up.

Catches people out all the time.

Am I missing something on saving projects?