Surge Supression

[bigbeark]

I spotted a couple of new items for sale at my local hardware recycler. This is medical technology but I'm thinking it would be great to protect computer systems:

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/261139004689?...84.m1423.l2649

and the ultimate 500-watt 20 pound gorilla:

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/261139033918?...84.m1423.l2649

I googled these items and this is serious stuff. The second one protects critical care hospital equipment. Any comments on this stuff?

[mockingbird]

Re: Surge Supression

bigbeark - have you bought before from this guy before? I've been following his store for quite some time now...

[ratdude747]

Re: Surge Supression

Overkill extreme. Good stuff.

[TELVM]

Re: Surge Supression

Found a couple pics showing the guts inside these Isobar Ultra gadgets, good stuff:

[redwire]

Re: Surge Supression

I have a few Isobar units and they are really good. I love the all metal case.
Definitely a good investment especially if you have poor power quality. After seeing all the el-cheapo power bars with tiny dime-sized varistors, loose wiring etc. I'd had enough and spent the big bucks on Isobar units.

The isolation transformer is probably to meet safety regulations with medical equipment in a hospital. They don't do anything with surges and noise, unless they are the ferro-resonant type, which are very inefficient and run hot.

[bigbeark]

Re: Surge Supression

bigbeark - have you bought before from this guy before? I've been following his store for quite some time now...

They are located about 20 miles away from me in the west end of Toronto, so I do a lot of business with them, always by pickup so I don't pay shipping.

I've bought motherboards, SATA & IDE hard drives, video cards, optical drives, you name it. Everything so far has been good. I've bought quite a few SCSI drives as well, a small number of these only detected the first 4472 bytes. They took them back without hesitation.

I like these guys, but Canada Post shipping is expensive if you are in the USA.

You have a lot more options in the US, like Liquisinc and Izzy's and others and from what I've seen USPS is way cheaper than Canada Post. Of course, the United States Postal Service loses millions of dollars every year as postage rates are kept low for political reasons!

[kc8adu]

Re: Surge Supression

the isobars are what i keep for use at home and shop.no plastic.
if one were to fail the case will contain it.refer to an earlier thread about burning plastic units!

[severach]

Re: Surge Supression

Hospital grade means sockets with stronger spade grips and a cover on the switch to prevent accidental turn off. "Nurse, how do you turn this life support machine back on?"

It's all junk. What you think it protects against and what it does protect against is very different. The Tripp Lite ISOBAR surge suppressor says UL1449. Do you know what that means?

After distilling out all of the techno speak, UL1449 means:

THIS PRODUCT DOES NOT PROTECT AGAINST LIGHTING!

and it is impossible for you to make it do so! Plug in lightning protection does not exist and will never exist so stop looking for it. You can protect against lightning but not with something that plugs in.

Does the isolation transformer isolate the ground too? If not then it does nothing of value.

I'll stick to my OneAC UPS with Virtual Kelvin ground.

[TELVM]

Re: Surge Supression

What would you recommend for home computers protection against lightning, Severach?

[bigbeark]

Re: Surge Supression

Hospital grade means sockets with stronger spade grips and a cover on the switch to prevent accidental turn off. "Nurse, how do you turn this life support machine back on?"

It's all junk. What you think it protects against and what it does protect against is very different. The Tripp Lite ISOBAR surge suppressor says UL1449. Do you know what that means?

After distilling out all of the techno speak, UL1449 means:

THIS PRODUCT DOES NOT PROTECT AGAINST LIGHTING!

and it is impossible for you to make it do so! Plug in lightning protection does not exist and will never exist so stop looking for it. You can protect against lightning but not with something that plugs in.

Does the isolation transformer isolate the ground too? If not then it does nothing of value.

I'll stick to my OneAC UPS with Virtual Kelvin ground.

If I were concerned about Lighntning, I would put a proper lighning rod or two on my roof!
My concern is "dirty power", brownouts, blackouts,spikes etc.

I grew up on a farm and saw the incredible destructive force of Lightning firsthand.
A neighbour's house was struck. Despite having lightning rods, the lighning took a route to ground through his eavestrough, which was completely pinholed. There was a pewter serving platter stored in his attic. Somehow the lightning jumped to the plate and melted it into a blob. Fortuneately there was no fire caused. I was about 8 years old at the time but I still remember that blob of pewter! There were of course, no 'puters in those days.

[severach]

Re: Surge Supression

Without an engineering budget any whole house surge protection device in the breaker box will be fine. The point is to shunt lightning to ground at the earliest possible point leaving the supply wire to your equipment and other protection devices as a shield against the lightning instead of a trap for it. The isolation transformer is a nice device so long as there is a surge suppressor upstream to push the surge into. A 100' extension cord coiled up will do the same thing.

I use the suppressor and capacitor duo at DeltaLA. There are others but I couldn't find any with as big of specs at a similar small price and no other company has caught on to the importance of the surge capacitor. Once that's installed Tripp-Lite and other products are no longer junk and will function as designed: as secondary surge suppressors with a primary suppressor upstream. Without the whole house suppression they are junk--not junk because they are poor quality but junk because they are not being used as designed. Proper surge suppression is a system, not a device.

Whole house suppressors are a hard sell for insurance addicts and city folk. Insurance addicts welcome any reason to get someone else to pay for new stuff and city folk have enough transformers and motor loads nearby that the surge is gobbled up before it can get anywhere. Reports of damaged equipment in cities is rare. Out in the country equipment loss from lightning is perennial.

I wouldn't put a lightning rod up. Unless you have the engineering budget of a radio station or substation you don't have what it takes to take the biggest direct strikes so best not to attract them unless you have no high objects nearby and you're going to get hit anyways. Most lightning damage is from strikes less than mile away and after it goes through the lines and a transformer or two a whole house suppressor is more than enough to shunt it away.

Dirty power and spikes are already handled by your equipment unless it's high end audio equipment with a low end power supply. Brownouts and blackouts need a UPS.

Apparently I can't spell when the type is too large. UL1449 says "This product does not protect against lightning." It's only for secondary surge suppression such as switches and inductive loads.

[Bills86e]

Re: Surge Supression

What would you recommend for home computers protection against lightning, Severach?

Tie your power cord in a tight knot. Do this for all your appliances as well.

A strong lightning spike should blow the cord to smitherines at the knot.

When a home is hit by lightning, it occures so quickly the Circuit Breakers melt in the "on" position.

Bills86e

[ThePCDoctor]

Re: Surge Supression

Any Surge protector, should never be mislabeled or confused with "Lightning Protection".

Once you have a good surge protector and UPS, the next stage in Lightning Protection is good Homeowners Insurance.
Because, no electronic circuit made by man can totally STOP a lightning bolt.
Ho hype.....just fact.

I used to design and build Surge Protection for Construction Vehicles, at CAT. We could effectively protect the Onboard Computer against high voltage spikes coming off of an errant Alternator, but that seldom exceeded spikes of around 250 volts.
That was a fairly simple task.....but Lightning Protection?..... Forgetaboutit!

Happy Holidays, Everyone!
Doc

[severach]

Re: Surge Supression

Surge suppressors are often confused with lightning protection. Look at the pictures of lightning on the box. That's what it protects against, right?

Part of the problem with lightning is the persistent myth that stopping it is the goal. No sane engineer tries to stop a lightning bolt because that can't be done. What you can do is to divert it away from protected equipment. How close to 100% you get is a matter of budget. I can't afford 100% at home so 99.9% will have to do but with a TV station, power plant, or phone company budget it can be done and with 100.001% reliability. Every strike, no matter how big, diverted to ground with no equipment damage and no more downtime than a blink of an eye. The aforementioned industries make it boringly easy. With millions in equipment at risk they can afford to hire the engineers that know how to manage lightning.

Just because you can't doesn't mean no one else can. Lighting follows all of Maxwell's laws and one you learn the rules of the game lightning management is easy even where the ground is poor or non-existent or you are on a limited budget. It's even easy on your CATs with the right tricks.

(Just in case, all of Bills86e post is for jest. Anything that can blow the knot apart has already destroyed connected equipment, another demonstration of how desperately people cling to the idea that lightning can be stopped without any consideration of a diversion upstream. Breakers do not melt in the on position because the surge is long over before the breaker can build enough heat or magnetic field to break.)

[smason]

Re: Surge Supression

Part of the problem with lightning is the persistent myth that stopping it is the goal. No sane engineer tries to stop a lightning bolt because that can't be done. What you can do is to divert it away from protected equipment. How close to 100% you get is a matter of budget

This system needs a like button.

[smason]

Re: Surge Supression

Found a couple pics showing the guts inside these Isobar Ultra gadgets, good stuff:

Ooooh, look at that. VHF Capacitors! Must be good!

[TELVM]

Re: Surge Supression

... (Just in case, all of Bills86e post is for jest ... )

Thanks for the clarification, I was already pondering on ...



( )

[ben7]

Re: Surge Supression

A good idea would be a gas discharge tube, which is installed in the main breaker panel, and protects the whole house. It is slightly slow at reacting, but it can take a LARGE amount of current, compared to MOVs!

[Blargh523]

Re: Surge Supression

Lightning aside, a surge protector won't help against brown-outs/grey-outs (Voltage droops), but they will protect against any over-voltage spikes and line noise your power company graces you with.

A Tripp-lite is considerably better than the generic hardware store glorified power strips, but if you want protection from brown/grey outs, you'll want a decent line-conditioning UPS.

Personally, I use a mix of APC and Tripp-lite, YMMV.

For lightning, I'd talk to an electrician/contractor. A "lightning arrestor" is something that can be attached to your breaker box.

[ThePCDoctor]

Re: Surge Supression

In designing Surge Protected circuits, like Engine Control Computers, at CAT, in the lab we found that MOV's are just too slow for suppression of sharp spikes. The device we wound up using was a solid state device from Motorola, called the "Transorb".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transie...pression_diode

They are lightning fast and can absorb a huge amount of energy in non-repetitive pulses.

I would never use MOV's in a surge protector to protect my own computer.

I assume that they are used so widely because they are so cheap. Eh?

Happy New Year, Everyone!
the Doctor