Cyberpower Surge Protector Warranty Warning Review

10-23-2024 : Nearly 9 years later and this warning review has been seen over 12,000 times. And to think, it would never have existed at all if they had simply honored their warranty for my $500-$600 computer. I was lucky the monitor and speakers, as well as the modem, were plugged into a different surge protector. They all survived just fine, but not the Cyberpower surge protector, it killed my desktop workstation. So thanks for stopping by and reading about my negative experience with them, and here’s to helping them not sell another 12,000+ units in the next 9 years.

I wanted to post a review of my experience to warn people about purchasing and relying on a Cyberpower surge protector, and their claim of a “lifetime warranty” against damage for your expensive electronic gear. Not only did the Cyberpower surge protector model 1080 surge protector (3600 joules) not work as it should have, destroying my motherboard and/or cpu (no way to tell without replacing both to test) while it caused damage whichever other parts, but they are not going to honor their insurance warranty. The actual product can be seen here – Cyberpower surge protector The following is my sadly negative Cyberpower surge protector review of unit (model 1080) and the damage warranty guarantee that they did not stand behind.

On September 5th we had a power surge and then outage here for about 2 hours. When the electricity came back on I attempted to start up my computer, but it would not boot and displayed an ’88’ error on the mobo. So I took it to the shop, and was told it wasn’t worth it to fix as there was no way to tell exactly what all had been damaged without a lot of time, and just randomly swapping the parts out until it worked again. So I filed a warranty claim, since the Cyberpower surge protector packaging and website said that it came with a $50,000 lifetime insurance gear warranty.

Fast forward to 2 weeks later and I got a denial of warranty against damage claim letter that said, “The unit was thoroughly tested and did not fail to operate and suppress surges as designed. Additionally there was no evidence of any electrical damage to the unit or indication a surge entered the device. Unfortunately the failure of your equipment was not a result of failure of the Cyberpower surge protector unit to operate as designed.” I feel like a victim being blamed here, and cannot fathom any other way to view it when that is the response I have gotten. Here is the actual denial of warranty claim letter that I received, containing the text I quoted above.

This could be the end of the review and it would be damning enough. To this day, now December 15th 2015, I have still not received my damaged computer gear back from Cyberpower yet. Nor have they ever explained how their Cyberpower surge protector could have not been the cause of the problem, since it was in use at the time (below, see my confusion as to how they seem to want to claim that electricity travels) when the damage occurred.

I am not an electrician (or usually a Cyberpower surge protector review writer) but not only did the Cyberpower surge protector unit not work as it was claimed to do, or as it was ‘designed’ as they say, it continued to supply (at least some, enough for the monitor and speakers to turn on) power after the incident had cause the damage to my computer. I am not sure what evidence they wanted, perhaps not having checked the blown modem, motherboard, ram, video card, or cpu that I sent them to check ? Surely those would show some evidence of an electrical failure. And I’m curious as to how they presume my equipment failed while running through the Cyberpower surge protector during a power failure / spike / outage and it was somehow not the direct result of the Cyberpower surge protector model 1080 failure that my gear was plugged into for protection against damage.

A friend of mine suggested to me that it was a good thing it didn’t fail in a hospital, or if it had been powering a fire alarm, both situations could have injured or killed someone and not just allow some electronic and computer gear be destroyed. I am left only to strongly suggest that anyone in the market for a power strip surge protector pass up any products from this company that makes false claims about their products ability to ‘save’ your hardware. And forget thinking they will even cover your replacement costs, let alone the time and stress you experience after one of their Cyberpower surge protectors fails to do it’s job and protect your valuable electronic gear from damage. While I doubt that all of the Cyberpower surge protectors are defective like mine was, is it really worth the risk when there are so many other choices for the same price or less that might actually stop the damage or honor their own warranty claims ?

I’m going to petition them to check again, and I will update my Cyberpower surge protector warranty insurance damage review when I hear back from the Cyberpower surge protector claims review adjuster. Today being 10-28-2015

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11-03-2015 – I got a reply :

From: slovett@cpsww.com
To: kinkos1jeffr@hotmail.com
Subject: Re: Power surge warranty claim problem.
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2015 14:44:03 +0000

11-20-2015 – Thanks so much to everyone who has contacted us about this review. If I haven’t gotten back to you yet I’m going to. Meanwhile, contact Shelby @ Claims, and I’ll shoot you the 2 emails I have for this company that doesn’t seem to want to be bothered with their products failure, and the bad reviews they are getting because of the disasters their customers are trying to pay for.

01-05-2016 – I still have not gotten my damaged computer gear back from the Cyberpower claims adjuster yet. It’s kind of not possible to have it checked out by a local electrician until they return the evidence. So my advice to anyone else making a warranty claim after a power surge protector failure would be to have their gear totally checked out before sending it, you never know if they will give it back, or try to bury it apparently. 🙁

01-19-2016 – Still no word from the Cyberpower surge protector warranty claims department.