 Welcome to Road Gear Reviews. I'm Josh from The Freedom Theory, and today we're reviewing the Opta UPS 600W Voltage Regulator. Stay tuned! As you can see, we protect a lot of sensitive electronics. In addition to the three computers, smartphone, and monitor that you see in my office, we also protect a TV, another laptop, three more phones, a Wi-Fi hotspot, a cellular booster, a Wi-Fi range extender, and many other electronic devices. We learned very quickly that protecting them was important. Something that we were not expecting when we began to travel was the poor power that we encounter in many RV parks and campgrounds. The damage that you're seeing here occurred in a single campground over the course of about one week. We didn't discover the problem until I went to unhook everything as we started to move. We were very fortunate that this didn't cause a fire. In addition to this damage, we also lost two smartphones that were worth hundreds of dollars, and the final straw for us was when we found a melted power cord on a surge protector inside of the RV. We were extremely fortunate that that didn't cause a fire that literally could have caused us to lose everything that we own. That's when we decided that we needed to do something to protect our devices. Now, if you're wondering what a voltage regulator does, it takes power that's coming from the power in your campground and makes sure that it stays within safe ranges. For sensitive electronics that use 120 volts, which is the standard, the safe range is going to be about 114 to 126 volts. That's plus or minus 5 percent from your standard 120 volt power. What a voltage regulator does is it makes sure that voltage that goes below or above that amount is regulated to within the safe range. If the voltage goes too high or too low, more or less than the voltage regulator can handle, then it cuts off power to the devices. Now, there are some products that are made to protect your entire RV van or whatever you use. We've had mixed success with those. One that we used only lasted for a few weeks before it stopped working, so we decided to not buy another of those. They're also much more expensive than these. These are slightly less than $40. So the solution that we chose was to get several of these and use them to protect the outlets that we charge our phones and computers off of. However, just be aware that you can experiment with something that protects your entire RV. That's certainly an option, but again, we didn't have good luck with that. This particular voltage regulator is made by Opta UPS. It weighs less than five pounds and currently is priced at just under $40 on Amazon. It's also Amazon Prime, so it comes with free shipping. The thing that makes this so cheap is that it does not operate as a UPS. A UPS is an uninterruptible power source, which basically means it has a very big battery that temporarily continues to provide power to your devices once power is cut off from your RV. I want to make that clear because the name of the company is Opta UPS, but this is not actually a UPS. That's why it's so light and so portable. Now we do also have a UPS. I use that in my office and the reason that I got a UPS is because, as you can see, I have a monitor in there and it was very frustrating when we were in a campground where the power kept going out, which happens very often. It was very frustrating to keep having my monitor turn off while I was trying to work. So I do have a UPS in my office, but for our laptops and our phones, they have batteries in them, so they continue to charge anyway, but a UPS, or excuse me, they don't continue to charge. They continue to have power when the power goes out, but if you want to continue providing power to a monitor or a TV or something like that, then a UPS is also a good option. I'm very happy with the one that I have, so we'll put a link to that in the description below. Some of the features that this provides, it provides voltage regulation to plus or minus 5%, which keeps the power within that 114 to 126 volt range. Now it will regulate that up to plus or minus 15%. What that means to put it a different way is that if the voltage drops to 102 volts, it'll regulate it up. If it spikes up to 136 volts, it'll regulate it down. In addition to that, it is a surge protector and if the power goes outside of those ranges, if it drops below 102 volts or goes above 136, then it cuts off power to the devices. As well as a voltage regulator, it is also a very good surge protector. In addition to that, it cleans up the power. This is a sine wave voltage regulator, so it takes the power that's coming in and it cleans it up to provide better power to your electronic devices. That's very important for anything that doesn't have a brick. If you look at a laptop power cord, it has that brick in it. If you look at a cell phone charger, it doesn't. Those laptop bricks will actually make sure that the power is safe for the laptop with a phone or something like that or a tablet. When you plug it in, whatever power that it's getting from the outlet is what it has and if there's bad power, it can damage the device or it can damage the batteries. We actually went through several batteries on some of our cell phones due to exactly that issue. Another thing that I like about this is that it doesn't beep when it's regulating the voltage. Something that's very frustrating for me with UPS is that when they start to regulate voltage, they actually start beeping to let you know that they're running partially off the battery. That's very frustrating and annoying if you're in a place where it has consistently low power and it keeps dipping and your UPS keeps beeping. This does give a small clicking noise but there's no beeping. Now the LEDs that you see on the front here, there's a standard LED to show you that you have power. Also the other LEDs will show you whether or not it's regulating the voltage and whether or not the voltage is spiking or dipping. Another thing that I really like is that one of the LEDs will show you whether or not the outlet is grounded. So if you ever plug this into an outlet and it says that it's not grounded, then you definitely don't want to be using that outlet. Now that's not as important for those of us who live in RVs and vans because all of our outlets should be grounded anyway but it is a nice feature to have. And as you can see on the back it has six outlets. It also has Ethernet data protection so you can plug an Ethernet cord into it and plug another Ethernet cord going out to your device. Power surges can travel over Ethernet connections so this is very important to have. So this has been a review of the OptiUPS SS 1200 600 watt voltage regulator. Please leave us a comment down below letting us know what tips and tricks you have and what your experiences have been with campground power. Please give this video a thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe for weekly reviews. I've put all of the information on this down in the links below as well as some information about the UPS that I use in my office. Thanks for watching and we'll see you guys next time.