2-plug or 8-plug?

Make sure the rating of the zerosurge unit is capable of 15A and your equipment will not draw more than about 12-13 amperes (1500VA). Other wise this should be fine.

Zerosurge/Brickwall.... both have to have a power capacity rating, I just didn't mention both.

The back of the components will have nameplate data, you would have to add all the nameplate data (watts or VA) for the components plugged into the outlet.

You can get rough estimates of amperage by taking the watts or VA and dividing by the outlet voltage (120V) for each component.

Even if the total rated power draw exceeds 15 amperes (1800 watts) you should be able to plug all into the same circuit (number of receptacles does not matter).

It would be extraordinary, even miraculous, if in actual use all of your AV devices drew their rated power at the same time and for more than a few seconds. Every thing in the power circuit, wire, overcurrent devices, and circuit breakers can handle brief peaks. Panel breakers (even cheap ones) are designed handle household motor startup currents.

The big items, amps and displays, just do not draw full power unless you run everything full out (display to max brightness, amps driven by test tones or highly compressed music).

All bets are off however if you also plug in a waffle iron and a microwave or if you are running stadium concert sound systems

The 80% rule still applies with circuit breakers. Loading up crappy 15A circuit breakers will only cause contact/terminal overheating and possible failure.

The 80% rule no doubt has a sound experiential basis, but in residential use for home theater/audio, it ignores the experience of those who plug in components with a rated draw exceeding the breaker rating and never experience a problem. Most people will never drive their A/V equipment to the max, and no matter what efficiency you assume for power supplies, the continuous load never hits the rated load. Even if it does, it does so so briefly as to fall within the overcurrent tolerance of any standard breaker (150% for 1 minute and more for shorter periods).

I don't have any personal experience with "crappy 15A circuit breakers", but if I were to come across one, a trip to any of several local stores would get a low cost, name brand breaker, (rated for 100% continuous load breaker if needed).

Home A/V just does not invoke the code's 80% rule for most of us. Now I know that there are some who have almost commercial home theater setups, and for those folks, both the 80% load rule and 20 amp dedicated circuits might be needed.

Reasonable and principled men may disagree; so we must be reasonable and principled. Certainly anyone who follows your advice will not be disappointed.

I experience crappy breakers every day!!
Every breaker you buy at Home depot, the local electrical supplier and Lowes is a crappy 15A breaker. They all have poor tolerances (trip curve and contact resistance) and due to these tolerances, can cause problems when loaded to only 80% of rating.

BTW, the tolerance curve goes the other way too. Sometimes the breaker doesn't trip at all when applied current to the long time element is 400-500% of rating. How long do you think a typical 15A breaker will remain closed with 150% of rated current applied?? If it operates within rated tolerance!

OK! I've not personally bought a breaker in some time, and those were from a local electrical supply house. So I can't dispute that the out of the bin breakers at home centers are in fact crappy either by design or poor production QC.

What you say is really alarming! A breaker that trips below its rating is annoying; one that takes 500% without tripping is dangerous. How long will it be before the retailers and the so called manufacturers are implicated in a fatal fire?

What do you do when you find one of these junk breakers? Have you found some makes and models to be up to the mark?
If there are good breakers, ones that perform to specs, it would pay us to use them. Not because it invalidates either of our positions on load, but because it could avoid serious harm.

You need to look at this from the standpoint of the manufacturers, I guess. These breakers typically cost them $3-4 to manufacture. I can guarantee that each of the breakers has not been tested (too costly), so they might test one in 100 or one in 1000 (batch testing). Whatever the batch size might be. BTW this same factory test scenario is no different than when a larger, much more costly breaker is manufactured (200-4000A range). I have been invoved in a number of facilities where new breakers failed during testing at rates from 10-25% due to poor tolerances.

Typically, we do not test small breakers (15-100A) with direct current injection. It is just too costly. However, we perform thermographic inspections of distribution equipment where we find overloaded breakers, loose connections, and corroded connections all of the time. Many times we identify circuit breakers with overloads via thermographic inspections and they might have only 5-10A on them, due to poor contact resistance.

I could tell you stories about how many of our customers have not performed maintenance on their distribution facilities for 20-30 years. During testing, we might find a number of protective devices inoperative. You know what we call a circuit breaker without overcurrent protection? A = A switch

So believe me, the last thing you want to do is to overload these things. Being an enginee, I can not in good conscience, tell anyone to load equipment past recommended levels.

P.S. Most manufacturers try to compete with breakers and panels at the residential level. I have not found a particular brand which is significantly better or worse than another. (Square D, Siemens, Cutler Hammer, GE etc)

What a sad commentary! There is nothing wrong at all with sampling a production run, and a failure rate of 25% in the production run might be OK (e.g., early LCD production and dead pixels). But ye gods and little fishes, that's not the same as selling a safety device with that defect rate.

I have used Square D panels and breakers with never a problem so I spent a few minutes on their web site. They say a great deal about standards and quality in general, but nothing very specific as to expected performance quality. There is quite a lot about awards and various standards, but if they said something about meeting ISO quality standards I missed it.

Production cost and market demand are the drivers, I guess.

I take you at your word, sir, and nevermore will I suggest anything other than de-rating to 80%...

If you are interested, I can post some IR pics from overloaded breakers etc, I also have one hell of a collection of 'blown up equipment pics' too.

I don't think the situation is too bad....after all, I make a living of testing equipment prior to energization. I do believe that the situation has been affected by manufacturing outside the USA. Quality of some products did seem fall severely when manufacturing was moved 'outside' in some instances.