Count the sockets on the wall of an average Nigerian flat, then count the things that need plugging into them. That gap is why extension boards never stop selling. Add a supply that comes back hard and spikes on the way in, and you have the reason the cheap ones start fires. On this product the difference between a safe board and a dangerous one costs the factory almost nothing and costs your customer everything.
Description
Thirteen amps. That is what a UK three-pin plug is fused at, and it is what a board has to survive on a bad evening with a fridge, a fan and a decoder all pulling at once. Whether it survives comes down to how much copper is inside the cable, and copper is the very first thing a factory thins out when somebody pushes them for a cheaper price.
The board pictured has individually switched outlets, USB and Type-C charging built into the body, and surge suppression on the mains side. Those individual switches earn their keep. They let a household keep a decoder or a charger plugged in but dead, which trims standby draw and, far more usefully here, cuts down how many things are sitting live at the exact moment the supply slams back on.
Charging ports have quietly become the reason one board beats another on a shelf. A family with four phones and two working wall sockets will pay a premium for something that charges directly. A proper Type-C port at a genuine fast-charge rating outsells a row of tired USB-A ports at identical money, every single time. Specify the port count and the charging standard when you order. Leave it open and you get whatever the factory has too many of.
What you cannot see is what you are really buying. Inside there is copper, a breaker or a fuse, and a surge component. A decent board has adequate conductor cross-section, a real resettable breaker, and an actual MOV wired in on the mains. A poor one has thin wire, a switch with a red button that interrupts nothing, and the word SURGE moulded into the plastic with no component behind it anywhere in the housing. On a shelf in Computer Village they are indistinguishable. One of them gets hot under a real load, and in a country where a single board routinely feeds a fridge, a fan and a decoder together, that heat is the entire risk.
Here is something we check now that we did not used to. A batch came back with the surge indicator LED wired straight to the mains instead of to the protection circuit, so the little light glowed away reassuringly whether or not the MOV had already sacrificed itself months earlier. Nobody was strictly lying. The lamp said protected and the board said nothing at all. We ask for internal photographs before quoting these days, and a supplier who would rather not provide them has told us most of what we needed to know.
Specification
What follows gets confirmed before we quote, against the named supplier and against a sample opened up on a bench. Conductor size and the breaker outweigh everything else on this list combined. Those two are the safety of the product. The rest is convenience.
| Socket format | UK three-pin for Nigeria. Universal-socket versions exist but they hold plugs less securely, so specify deliberately. |
|---|---|
| Outlet count | Multi-outlet board, individually switched. Count and layout are set when we quote. |
| USB and Type-C | Integrated USB-A and Type-C charging ports. Specify the fast-charge rating, since this is now the main buying reason. |
| Surge protection | MOV-based surge suppression on the mains side. We verify the component is actually fitted rather than just printed on the label. |
| Overload protection | Resettable breaker or fuse. It has to actually trip, so we test it rather than assume it. |
| Conductor | Copper cable, and the cross-section is the single biggest quality difference in this category. |
| Cable length | Available in several lengths. Longer cable needs thicker conductor to stay safe under load. |
| Rated load | Rated in amps for total draw. Match the rating to what your customers will genuinely plug in. |
| Housing | Flame-retardant moulded body. Cheap boards skip the flame-retardant grade to save money. |
| Mounting | Wall-mount keyholes on most builds, which matters for shops and offices. |
| Certification | CE and RoHS on the builds we quote. SONCAP is handled separately, see the notice below. |
We do not publish prices, because the landed figure depends on the specification, the Customs valuation and the exchange rate on the day you pay.
Minimum order
Fifty boards is the starting point, counted across the whole order. Four-way and six-way, short leads and long ones, black bodies and white: they all pool into the same fifty. Push above 100 and you get the usual improvement as freight and the certification file spread across more pieces. But on this product the more valuable thing volume buys you is leverage. At a few hundred boards, a factory will build to your conductor size and your breaker rating instead of handing you their house standard, and that is worth considerably more to you than any discount. It is the one product on this site where we actively push people to order more. Branded housings sit nearer the 100 mark for the usual tooling reasons.
Lead time. Roughly 20 to 30 days in production for a standard board, longer where the conductor size or breaker is being changed from the factory default, since that is a genuine build change rather than a label swap. Sea freight into Apapa or Tin Can adds 30 to 40 days. Boards are dense and stack well, so groupage works perfectly well here at modest quantities and you are not paying to ship air the way you would with lamps. SONCAP runs in parallel with production. Leave room at the Lagos end for clearing, which behaves however it feels like behaving on the day.
What decides the right one
Why is there only one board on this page?
Because a shape starts a conversation faster than any paragraph can. You look at the outlet layout, the switches and the ports, and within about a second you have either said yes, that arrangement, or no, I want the tower kind that stands upright on an office desk. Either reply gets us moving.
So is this the exact thing I would be buying?
Probably not, and that is the useful part. Venocipal sources against a brief rather than selling off shelves. Outlet count, socket format, cable length, conductor size, port mix, whose name ends up moulded into the top face: every one of those gets decided while we quote you. A trader supplying households and a company fitting out a floor of offices want different boards that happen to look alike in a photograph. Show us what you are after, whether that is a picture taken on a shelf in Computer Village, a marketplace link, or a couple of lines describing it, and we go and find who actually builds it. We will also tell you when the one you picked is badly made, which people do not always enjoy hearing from a supplier.
Why fifty, then?
Partly because no factory runs a batch to a specification below that, and partly because the SONCAP file costs the same whatever quantity sits behind it. There is a better reason on this product though. From fifty upward, and properly from a hundred upward, we can insist on the copper and the breaker instead of accepting whatever the standard build happens to be that month. Below that you are buying somebody else's decisions about safety. In this category, those are exactly the decisions worth paying to control.
Common questions
What quantity do you need to quote?
Fifty pieces across the whole order. Outlet counts, cable lengths and colours all pool together toward that fifty.
How can I tell whether a board is safe?
By the copper and the breaker. Never by the label, which costs nothing to print. We measure the conductor, load the board to its rating and confirm the breaker trips before we will quote a supplier at all.
Is the surge protection real?
On a good unit, yes. On a cheap one the word is on the case with nothing at all behind it. We open the sample and look for the component, and we have found boards where the indicator light was wired to mains rather than to the protection circuit.
USB, Type-C, or both?
Both, and name the fast-charge rating you want. This is now the single biggest reason a customer picks one board over another at the same price.
Which cable length should I stock?
Depends on your market, but bear in mind that a longer cable needs thicker copper to stay safe. We will not quote you a long board on thin conductor, so do not ask.
Do you handle other formats?
Yes. Tower boards, wall-mounted units, individually metered sockets, heavy-duty industrial versions. Send the picture and we will go looking.
Can I have my own brand on the housing?
You can, and it lifts the minimum toward 100, because a moulded or printed housing carries tooling and setup costs that need spreading across enough units to make sense.
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Send the layout, or just send a photo
Give us the outlet count, the cable length, the charging ports you want and how many boards. That is enough to price against. Or skip the specification entirely, send a photo of a board you already sell, and we will track down who makes it, measure the copper, test the breaker and quote it landed in Nigeria. One promise on this product in particular: if the board you have picked is not something we would put our own name on, you will hear it before you have paid for it rather than after your customer has.
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