Labthrift Labthrift Buy the boring upgrade. Skip the rest.

Notes / Closet adjacent

Editorial, 22 Aug 2026. Specs from maker pages and recent street reports. We have not burned these units in. Affiliate tags are not live.

A metal rack power strip that is not a fire hazard

The closet failure mode is a $12 no-name strip under a UPS. Buy a UL-listed all-metal 15 A 1U strip with a switch cover, and plug it into the UPS.

Skip $400 ATS PDUs until you have two power sources. Hang it on the 12U 2-post. The UPS note is here.

The short list

StripWhat it isStreet, 22 Aug 2026Buy if
Eaton / Tripp Lite RS-121512-outlet 1U, 15 A, 15 ft 5-15P, 6 front / 6 rear, metal, UL/cUL, switch cover, 15 A breaker, lock cover, lifetime warranty. UPC 037332011534. ASIN B0000513OF. Alternate listing ASIN B00589N59Q.Alternate listing showed $104.66. Recheck live.Default closet strip. Plug this into the UPS, not the wall under the UPS.
RS-1215-RARight-angle sibling. ASIN B00006B834.Listing live. No clean street this pass.The 15 ft cord needs a right-angle plug.

Skip

Skip no-name 15 A strips without UL. Skip plastic $12 strips under a UPS. Skip Tripp Lite PDUMH15AT ATS (ASIN B000MNBWW0, $435.65) for a first closet — that is a dual-feed product, not a strip.

Sources

Amazon RS-1215. Eaton RS-1215 spec (UL listed, 15 A breaker, lock cover). Amazon alternate RS-1215 listing ($104.66 on capture). Amazon ATS price on ASIN B000MNBWW0 as the skip.

Also in this lane

2.5-inch SATA SSD for a Proxmox boot disk250–500 GB SATA with a DRAM cache. Do not put guests on the boot disk. HDMI dummy plug for a headless mini PCA $16 EDID dongle, not a GPU project. Cheap KVM-over-IP for a closet you do not want to sit inA $100 HDMI+USB KVM is how you hit BIOS without crawling into the closet.