Electronics Protection

[midgetwaiter]

Originally Posted by Slick Fork

Hi there,
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).

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.

Originally Posted by Slick Fork

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?

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.