To protect or not to protect.... surge suppression?

[Sawbit]

A question form the new guy. Have surge suppressors been suggested? Necessary? Or is my wife correct and I worry too much?

[Jeff_Birt]

I do not keep my machine plugged in when not in use which helps a bunch. If you get a surge supressor get a good one, Belkin, etc, that has a warrenty with it.

[Bane]

I would suggest a surge suppressor. It is a motor and motors create spikes. It should hurt to have one anyway.

[BenCraig]

I work in the insurance industry (Catastrophe Adjuster.) I see lots of things go wrong. Having said that, I protect things as much as I can. My rule of thumb is this, anything electronic that costs more than $25 is plugged into a surge protector. So, my vote is, 'Yes. Buy a surge protector.'

BC

[pkunk]

I have whole house surge suppression on both my house & the shop. Today we had a surge/momentary failure whilst the Carvewright™ was running & it stopped & showed a message indicating a power problem. I get this alot and the Carvewright™ just shrugs it off. I'd recommend one for anything electronic, including lightbulbs.

[Wood Butcher]

The problem with retail surge suppressors is design.
The most that they contain is a single MOV (metal oxide varistor) with single mode phase to ground protection. The MOVs they use have a disk of metal oxide less than the size of a dime with a 5mm wire soldered to each side. The thickness of the disc will determine the “Clamp” voltage. Once the voltage reaches the clamping level the resistance of the disk breaks down and shorts to ground. Depending on the size and duration of the surge the results range from a really neat ball of sparks and fire to a simple fracture of the 5mm solder joint. With the later the MOV is useless but appears to be intact. The only way to test them is with a current limiting, variable voltage source.
UL requires that for an MOV to be granted a yellow card they must clamp within their rating and maintain a .25 amperage current flow for 24 hours.
Read the fine print on the insurance offered with these suppressors. Some have many caveats and others state a dollar limit. Most of the manufactures attach a rider to their P&CO coverage knowing if they sell 10 million of them there may be .001% of the purchasers that keep the insurance info and actually file a claim.
There are ways to protect your equipment that you can install yourself. If the interest is here I will post some instructions.

This is what I fear.
:cry: :cry:

[Greybeard]

Ouch.
Please post advice, as I've got lots of kit hanging on the end of "retail surge suppressors".

John

[HandTurnedMaple]

This is what I fear.
:cry: :cry:

http://www.mrsellc.com/contactus.html

If lightning is what you fear, email these guys. He is a retired electrical engineer and created the "Lightning Lockout." The product is no longer listed on his page (but all of the woodcrafts there I used to make for him until I moved to Idaho 3 months ago).

My understanding of it is not perfect, but basically when the voltage surge exceeds a certain amount it closes and channels the power back "to the electric company" as he used to say. Its designed specifically to protect electronics against lightning strikes (thus the name). I have no doubts he still has some units left. You can see a picture of it on their homepage, sitting on the display (which I created) labelled "For the Business." I think they sold for around $50-60.

[Wood Butcher]

The Surge info is coming. I may need to post a link for readability and placing the pictures where the content makes sense. I haven’t forgotten about this.
One of the sad but true elements of surge damaged equipment is, sometimes the damage is not apparent until weeks or months later.
Let me explain.
If the electronic component survives the initial burn in you can expect a mean time before failure (MTBF) of 20 years.
The component has an operating voltage threshold. Say for example 10volts.
The immediate destruction threshold is 100 volts.
If the surge is 50 volts the device will not immediately disintegrate but the MTBF is drastically shortened.
It is not a linear curve but exponential.
Every 10 volts above the operating threshold cuts the life in half. A 30 volt surge will reduce the life by 3/4.
The first 10 volts over takes the initial half the second 10 volts takes another half, and so on.
Everything seems fine after the smoke clears and three months later the system crashes. The culprit is the surge.
Adjusters hate me. (Sorry Ben) Just doing my job.
:D

[pkunk]

What's your impression of whole house surge suppressors?

[HighTechOkie]

I've heard nothing but good things about the Panamax line of whole house suppression. Smarthome.com has the Panamax Primax (http://www.smarthome.com/4839.html) for $108.

While on the topic of power. Wood Butcher, what are your thaughts on voltage regulators and noise filtering? I am NOT referring to the Belkin or Monster Power line of crap either. More specifically,using a good UPS with AVR and noise filtering. I wonder how many errors and random behavior is a result of power fluctuations or other signals on the a/c line.

Rob

[Digitalwoodshop]

Food For Thought on all the Equipment Errors that a small group of users have seen. Might be time to rethink the 3 to 2 wire power plugs

I am not an engineer but I have been in Electrical and Electronics for over 31 years. Lots of Navy Electronic Schools plus Sony had Factory Automation Training with Omron, Fanuc, Lapel, Piller, and Buss Fuse to name a few. I picked up a few things along the way.

When I worked at Sony in San Diego, I did 2 years as a Maintenance Technician on the 17 inch CRT line. Then worked 2 years in the Calibration Lab, a great job running a calibration bench. From my Navy days I knew the story about Fluke Multimeters being recalled. At Fluke Calibration School in Los Angles, CA, I got the rest of the story. When the design for the new Fluke 77, 23, 75, etc. was finalized, they gave the design to a Senior Engineer for review and he was offered a bonus to remove any unnecessary parts that he found in the comprehensive design to save money. He removed a series of surface mounted capacitors that he saw no useful function for and he collected his bonus. Off to production they go and sometime later about 1994 it was discovered after a few deaths that...... IF you were to measure a voltage above 400 volts AC, say a 440 VAC Circuit Breaker or Buss Bar...... AND you placed the RED Positive Lead on the 440 VAC source...... THEN you connected the Black Negative Lead from your Fluke 77 Multimeter to the 440 VAC source the Fluke Multimeter would SOMETIMES READ ZERO VOLTS IN ERROR. This was caused by the FLOATING GROUND of the black lead hanging in the air before being attached to the circuit would cause the Fluke Multimeter to read ZERO VOLTS. You got it..... The removed Capacitors were there to prevent the problem from happening as they were part of the coupling circuit.

At Sony in the Cal Lab in 1997, I found that they never got the word about the meters so I got a copy from my Navy buddies and we preceded to find over 50 meters in use in the plant. From this link you can see some of the details. In searching for a link about it I found that recalls are very common.

http://www.hanford.gov/rl/?page=750&parent=748 I couldn't find it on the Fluke web sight.

SO.... Is the 2 wire power cord a good idea.....? Who decided......


AL

1. Electrical surge can cause this problem but in this case it was chemical. Saw a lot of bad Caps at the Sony Service Center. A Power Surge will make Cap's bulge like this too leading to future failure like someone above said. MTBF.... Saw this fixing Computer Moitors and sometimes in DVD Players and Play Station 2's.

http://www.siliconchip.com.au/cms/A_30328/article.html

2. Ground Loop info and the fun it will cause.

http://www.epanorama.net/documents/groundloop/

3. And the Biggie, lots of interesting information I believe holds the answers to some of the equipment malfunctions.

http://www.copper.org/applications/electrical/pq/casestudy/grounding.html

Ground Loops, Static Electricity, and Logic Circuits.......

******************************************

That's when the trouble started.

Little things went wrong at first, but they got worse and more expensive over the next four years, especially whenever thunderstorms passed nearby.

"I used to call them 'gremlins' or 'sunspots' because our problems were very sporadic," recalls John Stiles III, McAfee's senior programmer and the man who sold management on the benefits of networking. "We had so many 'little' symptoms that finding the exact cause of the problem was difficult."

In fact, the problems were anything but little when you added them up:

Communication to a CNC machine would stop in mid-program or never start in the first place. So much for better machine control.

CRT screens would flicker or distort. An annoying problem, maybe, but a sign of more trouble to come.

Characters in programs would be missing or altered.

Ports on the computer side of the server box would quit working. No port, no communication; no communication, no production.

Communications boards in the CNC machines' computers would burn out and have to be replaced. Boards aren't cheap; these costs added up quickly.


************************************************** *
PowerEdge Technologies recommends that installations housing sensitive electronics have a ground resistance to earth less than 10 ohms; none of McAfee's CNC machines met that criterion, and one measured a startling 570 ohms! To make matters worse, neutral-to-ground potentials at the various machines measured between 33.2 V and 50 V. OEMs recommend that neutral-to-ground potentials be less than 2 V. "RS-232 systems operate between 8 V and 12 V." Observes John Stiles, "With the readings we had, I'm surprised the system ever worked at all!"


*************************************************

Any differences in the ground resistance of the main and supplemental grounding electrodes can drive ground loop currents circulating through the ground and grounding connectors connecting machines with other elements in the electrical and/or data systems. The grounding shield surrounding data cables connecting CNC machines and the central computer are one such return path. Current flowing in this path as a result of ground loops constitutes a noise signal that can disrupt data communications. This is precisely what happened at McAfee Tool & Die before the supplemental electrodes were disconnected and a proper grounding system was installed.


Stepping off of my "Soap Box"

[HandTurnedMaple]

So that's the price of a Fluke after trimming the fat??? IS it any wonder I buy my multimeters at Advanced Auto?? :lol:

[Greybeard]

Digitalwoodshop, thanks for the links. With my own background of British Army electronics I could read and follow the problems outlined, but I still learned something.

I have been concerned about the two prong power connector, and I think those links underline the possible(probable?)problems very clearly.

John