Thanks for the great posts so far. Perhaps I didn't make it clear in my original post--our equipment is and always has been plugged into the red receptacle. It was installed by hospital electricians a number of years ago for us, and we are the sole load on the circuit. It was the recent storm, and presumed lightning strike, that tripped the AC breaker in the emergency breaker panel in the penthouse where our stuff is.
The point of all this is that the breaker tripped, leaving our equipment with no power <duh hehehe>. So I was proposing a method of implementing a "backup breaker" in case one breaker trips. My proposal is that our normal, daily supply would be the white receptacle. If it goes dead, whether from utility failure or breaker trip, we have the red receptacle, which will then be ready to feed our stuff. The reason we would not want to be on the red receptacle normally is that in case of a lightning strike we are potentially left with a dead red from the strike, and dead white if the utility is down. Obviously, another strike, after we've switched to the red, kills AC totally to our stuff. The presumption is that a breaker probably won't trip, even after a strike, if there's not a load of some sort on it to complete a path for the "tripping" current. Make sense? Eric, I think you're on my line of thinking. Good point on keeping the greens isolated. Laryn K8TVZ
