Question about red electrical outlets

[Doug Kanter]

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

[marks542004]

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.

[Commodore Joe Redcloud©]

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

Commodore Joe Redcloud©

[Kevin Ricks]

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

[Doug Kanter]

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.

[Chip C]

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.=20

Chip C Toronto

[g.a.miller]

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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