Electronics Protection

[mike31154]

Originally Posted by midgetwaiter

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.