Hands On: Panamax M4315-PRO Power Conditioner

The M4315-PRO power conditioner from Panamax might be the smartest product you’ll add to a home theater rack, literally. Thanks to the incorporation of Panamax’s BlueBOLT technology, you get the benefits of power protection with the extra allure of energy management and monitoring for connected devices.

I tested the M4315-PRO in my home theater, which provides a good, basic representation of what you’ll likely deal with as a single-room solution (higher-performance theaters may require more than one of these conveniently slim units).

Following the included Quick Start Guide, product setup was simple, and it is a mere two pages of instructions and product details.

You’ll find one “always-on” front outlet, into which I plugged my projector, mainly because of its close proximity. However, this might be a good spot to power a cable box that needs to remain on for DVR use.

The rear panel features eight outlets — they can all be individually controlled, but are also grouped into four filter-isolated pairs, including one pair of high-current outlets. The rear also incorporates the M4315-PRO’s AC inlet, ground lug, CATV/Sat connections, LAN Cat 5 protection pass-through, analog telephone/DSL protection pass-through, DC trigger, and the all-important BlueBOLT-CV1 card. An optional RS-232 card is included.

My electronics maxed out the M4315-PRO’s nine outlets. I used the controllable outlets for: cable box, Blu-ray player, phono preamp, turntable, subwoofer, pre-pro and amplifier (mine employs dual power cords).

The front panel has two reboot buttons; status indicators for the eight outlets; volts/amps indicator; brightness knob that also allows toggle between volts/amps; status indicators for unsafe voltage, breaker, wiring fault and temperature; and 15-amp breaker (Panamax also offers an M4320-PRO with 20-amp breaker).

I connected a standard Ethernet cable to the BlueBOLT jack from my Linksys router, and plugged in the conditioner. That’s when the first light started blinking, as the red breaker indicator identified one last step — flipping on the breaker, which initiates the blue outlet indicators to light up one by one.

With the gear up and running, I tackled the BlueBOLT setup. It’s a slick solution that requires no software, because it is browser-based (so you can tap into clients’ devices from anywhere you can access the web). Again, setup is a snap as you make your way through the directions on www.mybluebolt.com.

Photos: Hands On: Panamax M4315-PRO

I created an account, and upon email validation I logged in. The steps are very straightforward and tabs are easy to navigate. After naming your location, you can quickly register and activate your M4315-PRO via the MAC address and challenge key label.

Checking the Energy Management user interface page further confirmed that things were working properly, as my kWh quickly increased from 0.45 to 0.46; the interface yields data such as current watts, volts, amps, peak power, energy usage, budget and consumption over budget ratio, and you can view by day, week and month.

The Outlet Controls view shows volt and amp meters at the top — it was cool to log in from my work PC and see that amps had reduced from 3.3 with everything on to 0.9 in stand-by) — and the eight outlets below, with a green power icon and blue refresh icon for each. I accidentally hit the green icon for outlet 1 and found out the hard way that it worked — my preamp instantly shut off.

You can input a slew of power event and energy management alerts to receive via email, plus schedule specific conservation commands per outlet or bank. I tested this by programming a shutdown of my phono preamp while I spun some records, set to a precise day and time. While I didn’t appreciate interrupting my listening session, I did appreciate that the M4315-PRO passed the test with flying colors — as will your clients when the energy savings start kicking in.