Electronics Protection
 

Hi there,

I've been doing some research on protecting home electronic equipment in the last little bit and have come across an interesting article. I had started out looking at the standard "surge" protectors and noticed that you can get $20 powerbars all the way up to the $250 monster brand surge protectors so I wanted to find out what the difference was and stumbled across this article:

http://www.bitzenbytes.com/Content-Arcanum-18-1-16.html

The long and short of it is that a true surge is an event that happens extremely rarely and the only protection from it is a whole house surge protector at the point where the electric line comes in and is close to an actual earth ground. Surge protectors are useless when dealing with lightning strikes, blackouts, brownouts, line noise, and line harmonics (not sure what that is).

What does everyone else think? To me, the article makes a good case.

So, the next questions I have would be if I accept that plug in surge protectors are useless, what are the real threats to our electronics and how do we protect against them? How sensitive is the computer or home theater system compared to an unprotected digital alarm clock or phone base that has been fine through all sorts of crap?

You can get surge devices that are placed on the mains at the electrical panel that will provide better protection than power bars ever will but question is are they really needed. Electrical utilities in Canada provide rather clean power, even in remote communities that rely on gensets.

I don't know about all that. I do agree that the need for a surge protecter to protect against surges is overstates, as true power surges are very rare. In my previous line of work I had the chance to work with pretty much any surge/batterybackup/monster power center available to a consumer. What I do know for sure is that the Monster Power centers designed for home theater use make a difference in picture quality as well as sound quality and the over all life of you home theater depending on which one you buy. I don't have specifics, but I have seen and heard the difference first hand on many occasions.

Other than that, I would say past the obvious advantages to a battery back up surge protectors make a great place to plug a lot of stuff into.

Surge protectors are useless in all of those situations because they are not designed to deal with any of those problems. All a surge protector does is shut itself off when the voltage on the line increases above 330v for some reason. In the case of a very large surge (ie lightning strike) then you are screwed because the surge protector's switch gets fused be the amount of power on the line.

The problem is that due to lack of understanding these products are oversold and people expect them to do all of the things you outlined above.

Well the simple answer to this is that neither your alarm clock or pug in phone base has a whole lot a decisions to make. Electronics make decisions like put this pixel over here and make it red buy evaluating the differences in voltage across a set of contacts, screwups in input voltage means screwups in decisions. This leads to crashing computers and bad TV pictures etc but deciding if you have a problem like this is not a simple task. There are aspects of AC power that are confusing as hell and the gear to measure what is going on is expensive.

Most people will not have significant issues with their electronics because of power issues but it happens. My girlfriends apartment building has issues for sure, the TV goes wonky sometimes and her PC was very prone to odd crashes on a regular basis. The power supply on it eventually died and her wireless router packed it in as well.

This is the kind of situation that the Monster power conditioner products are designed to correct. I have no doubt that those are fine products but the price premium on them is completely unjustified. It's pretty simple device really, the incoming power goes through a transformer / rectifier set making the output a nice clean sine wave in the correct phase. If you think you have a problem like this you can find something to deal with it for about $50.

This is a decent little unit:
http://www.apc.com/products/family/index.cfm?id=67

You can also use a computer UPS to sole the issue. Because the inverter needs pretty clean power to do a decent job the output from them is very clean. You can get a 450VA APC unit at Costco for $35.

Definitely agree with the outrageous pricing of monster products. Marketing at its finest. For most of our aquarium equipment I would advise against using surge protection devices. In fact the unit recommended above has the following statement in its user manual:

"Appliances not suitable for use with the Line-R are items such as refrigerators, freezers, power tools, air conditioners, dehumidifiers, blenders, or any device that employs an AC motor for operation. Not for use with life sustaining equipment and any device with a power requirement exceeding the “Maximum Output Power Capacity” rating listed in the Specifications table."

Note the reference to "any device that uses an AC motor" which pretty well covers every power head out there, although the newer controllable ones are now using DC power. Aside from protecting your equipment, I'd say protect yourself first, by ensuring that your aquarium equipment is protected by a GFCI device.

Edit: oops my bad, in my haste to respond I missed the fact that this is a 'lounge' thread and we're talking about electronics in general, not necessarily aquarium stuff. My apologies.

I realize that a tv has more decisions to make then an alarm clock, my speculation was more along the lines of is a $20 alarm clocks circuits really that much more robust then a tv or dvd players?

I think the trouble with most of the computer battery backups is that since they are designed for computers that don't care what kind of signal they're getting the easy way is for them to output in a modified or stepped sine wave. The more expensive ones will output a true sine wave which is what ac motors need.

I saw at future shop the other day a Monster brand power bar with the phase one power cleaner for $99. I guess if I looked at it as $40 for a decent powerbar and $50 for a power cleaner I could justify it if the consensus is that the power cleaners aren't just smoke and mirrors. I think the most fool-proof protection would be one of those "always-on true sine wave" UPS's but that's an investment of another $900.

Not much you can do
 

From a guy who acutally does deal with bad power and lot of expensive and complicated computer systems -- there is really squat you can do.

The surge suppressors are just a "gap" ground that shorts across when the voltage gets high enough. I end up using "line active" UPS units a lot, which are ones that ate about the same as a battery charger, battery and pure sine wave inverter. And decent ones are about $2 per watt. So, for my tank I would need about a $4000 UPS to protect from bad power :)

But, how much stuff do you have on a tank that would acually get hurt? Most switched power converted units can take a lot of abuse. and most electric motors can handle short term high spikes in power.
Check the voltage range on your electronics -- most of it can *operate* from about 50V to 300V input. I have seen some real bad power, and usually the problems are from LOW voltage, which causes the power supplies to overheat. Electronics are quite robust and the PLC systems that quarium controllers are made for are VERY resilient to power problems.

So, the monster products are more of a scam than anything. Usually they are just a $5 surge suppressor, and sometimes they are a $25 non-line active UPS. BTW. those real bad non-sinewave inverters can't run a AC pump without causing damage to the motor.


Bottom line -- it's cheaper to have a backup part than it is to have clean power. Monster cable power products don't acutally do anything useful.

Yeah in a way they are more robust. The density of transistors in something like a computer CPU is such that small irregularities can become big problems. You won't see complicated ICs like that in an alarm clock but things like TVs and DVD players are full of them. I'm reminded of a motherboard I had a few years ago that exhibited odd behavior under heavy loads. It turn out that some of the capacitors on the board were faulty and were resulting the in 3.3v line to the CPU dropping to 3.21v under load, then the computer would crash.

That's a whole other kettle of fish though. If your power is so bad that you get issues running something "electrical" like a powerhead you need to get an electrician out, they're not very fussy. It's "electronics" like PCs and home theater things like are more likely to need something to regulate power. Even if a switching power supply does not fail it's output can get skewed enough to cause problems.


I think $99 is still pretty spendy, again the necessity of these things is being overstated. In 12 years of computer related work I can count the number of times bad power was a problem on one hand. I can't believe that a DVD player is any more susceptible to this type of thing than a PC and aquarium equipment is most definitely not.

The front end of most any product with a processor these days is a power supply that converts the line AC into various levels of DC voltage. Pretty much the same idea with most television and radio appliances. The DC is then again internally converted back to various AC voltages for clock circuits etc. It's this front end that will take the brunt of any power irregularities. Most of these are additionally fused so that the very sensitive electronics downstream of all this are fairly well shielded. I'd hazard to guess that it would take a substantial spike, such as lightning to really damage any of this stuff and if that happens, no surge protector in the world is going to help.

Once you open the case of one of these items, it doesn't take much to damage the goodies on the printed circuit board. Walk across the carpet in a dry room, touch an IC on the board and that could be the end of it. Thats why repair technicians wear little wrist bands that are grounded when they're working on this stuff and it's also why sensitive replacement components come in static proof packaging.

I have had wiring problems in my house. Acctually the Neutral came loose in the meter base. WHen that happens. some things get low voltage, where others, like the electronics, can get close to 240v. My computer, which was protected by a good APC power bar with surge protection, it survived. The powerbar did not, but the computer and related items did. In that incident, I lost a 52"TV, Yamaha Receiver, Paradigm subwoofer, Denon DVD, VCR, microwave, 3 clocks, and a crapload of screw in flourescent lights....