 Welcome to Rail Gear Reviews. I'm Mark from RVLove and today we're talking about the SureGuard 34850 Full Protection Portable. Stay tuned. Welcome back to Rail Gear Reviews. Again, today we're talking about the Southwire SureGuard Full Protection Portable. What this is is it's basically a product that is built to protect your RV from a power pedestal that has bad power coming through it. When you have a regular house, you might have really consistent power, but in RV parks it's not necessarily the case. RV parks, because there's such varying loads on them and some of the parks are older, you sometimes see some really inconsistent electrical current. That's what this is for is to protect you from that bad current, because if you have bad current coming into your RV, it could be damaging any of your household appliances like microwaves, air conditioners, computers, televisions, or any other electronic equipment. The product is about 5 inches by 22 inches by 4 inches. SureGuard makes a lot of different surge protectors and other electronic components. This particular one, the 34850, is built for a 50 amp RV. They make one that's very similar, that's for a 30 amp, that is also a full protection. They also have a hardwired version which are permanently wired to the RV. This portable version is much easier to use and that you can just plug it in as though it's an extension of your regular cord without needing an electrician or professional to install it into your RV. Being a full protection model, this will protect from open neutral, open ground, a miswired pedestal, reverse polarity. This will also protect you against if the voltage gets too low or too high. So the voltage is meant to be around 120, so if the voltage gets below 102 or above 132 for more than 8 seconds, this unit will shut off all the power to your RV to protect it from damaging any of the electronics in your RV. Now when this does automatically shut off, it will try and restart as soon as the voltage restores to the correct voltage level, but it will not restart for at least 128 seconds because that allows time for your air conditioning units to release the pressure so it doesn't cause any damage by coming on and off too quickly. The 128 second delay is also in effect any time you plug this in because the unit is doing diagnostics on the electrical current that it's receiving before sending it through it to your RV. This particular unit also has the ability to turn off if the electrical outlet gets too hot. If you get too hot of an outlet, it could eventually be working its way through your system and damage it and this is the only one that I'm aware of that has that feature. It's also weather resistant, that means it's fine to be out in the rain but you wouldn't want to submerge it. You wouldn't want to leave this out in a way that could allow it to get submerged underwater because that could cause damage. So as I mentioned this is super easy to use. You just plug this into the receptacle and then plug your RV cord into this end but we'll go ahead and show it. In effect we'll go plug it into the outlet and show you how this works. Alright so here we are outside. I've lifted up the panel on our power pedestal and you can see that I've turned off all the breakers. You always want to have all the breakers turned off before you plug anything into it to avoid any arcing. Alright once the breakers are turned off you simply plug the surge guard into the outlet and then plug in your RV cord into the other end of the surge guard and turn on the breaker. The easiest is that. You can see here that this red light is blinking that's indicating that the unit is doing its diagnostic testing to make sure that the current is okay. You'll see the delay right here and it'll be counting up to 128 seconds. Once it reaches that 128 seconds you usually hear a little click and that will indicate that it's ready to send power to your RV that it has checked the power and it's safe to send your RV. Basically this is like having an electrician out here monitoring your electrical current at all times cause it's continuously monitoring it the entire time it's turned on. You can also see in this LED display now that it's up and running and this being a 50 amp circuit it has line 1 and line 2 it's showing you the amount of current that's coming in on both line 1 and line 2 showing the amount of volts and the amps that are currently being drawn. If this was a 30 amp unit it would have only been giving us information for line 1 because a 30 amp circuit does not have two full live circuits like this 50 amp. One of the advantages of the hardwired version is that once it's hardwired inside your RV obviously it's nice and secure and in an enclosed environment. This portable version is weather resistant so it's fine to be outside but unfortunately every once in a while one of these can get stolen by a less scrupulous individual. So we decided to buy a lock hasp which is basically a plastic case that enables you to lock the surge guard to your RV cord which then prevents any unauthorized removal of your surge guard from the post. It's really simple to put together. You simply put these two, slide the lock hasp together after it's overlapping the cord and then you have a simple lock that you run through this side of it and that will keep it in place. Even though our RV came with a transfer switch that also has some power protection we still wanted to have one of these external surge guards prevent the power from coming into the coach and causing any damage. We really liked the idea of having this external checking the power before it ever gets to our RV. If you don't have a built-in surge protector in your RV then one of these units becomes far more important. I still think it's a great addition even if you do have built-in surge protection and that's why we started shopping one of these. We had narrowed down to this brand and so when this brand reached out to road gear reviews and asked if we'd like to test one of these units we jumped on the opportunity so we're very excited to have this and check it out and share it with you all. So what do I like about our surge guard? I love that it's 50 amp capable and that it still works even if I have a 30 amp hook up I can still use this by using a dog bone to reduce from 30 amp to the 50 amp cord and this will still be a good diagnostic tool to make sure that the power that's coming in is still good power. I really like that this unit is mounted outside of the RV so it protects any so if there's ever any really extreme surge that completely destroys the surge guard I know it stops out at the pedestal with this unit it does never even makes it into the RV. I think that's a nice additional bonus. I love that this is portable so if I ever change RVs this can be easily unlocked from my power cord and brought to my new RV and I continue to have this long term because this should last a very long time. I like the delay start and that it's consistently checking the power at all times. The 128 seconds that it takes before providing power to RV make sure that the energy is nice and clean before it comes on. I also like that delay feature because if we ever have a power outage which in RV parks actually happens far more frequently than we ever had in our stick and break home but anytime you lose power it's going to have that nice 128 second delay before it turns power back on which protects our appliances especially our AC units that need time to release pressure before restarting and I don't know if you've ever experienced this but when I've had power outages at home and in the RV parks sometimes it comes on very briefly and then right back off and by having 128 second delay it ensures that you're going to have a more stable energy before it sends any energy into your RV. I really like the digital readout that at any time I can walk out and see how it's going and see what the energy is looking like coming into RV and I like that it's 24-7 sitting out there protecting from any crazy surges or low or high voltage. In RV parks, especially older RV parks with a little less robust electricity systems, they can easily be overrun in the summers especially when you have a lot of big RVs running two and even three air conditioning units and those older parks really aren't meant for the kind of energy requirements of some of the modern coaches. When we first started RVing I was just banking on the fact that I had the built-in Surge Guard but after talking to a couple electricians and seeing their lack of faith in RV Park electrical systems it made me that much more excited about having an external unit to give us the extra protection. Alright, well that was a quick review of the Southwire Surge Guard 34850 full protection portable. I hope you found this informative and useful. We'll of course put links to this product in the description below. 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