Disklavier

From: Mark

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A premium grade UPS also "conditions" or "cleans up" the electric supply. Some 
of you may want to ask the CompUSA tech about the different features a UPS may 
have.

Mark in Idaho

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This is the one thing that gets misunderstood the most when talking about UPS's. 
By far, most of the *commercial* grade UPS's do *not* provide protection for the 
device connected to it (Disklavier in this case) from electrical line power 
(mains) surges or electrical noise. They are used to provide temporary line 
voltage at the correct frequency when line power is disrupted or droops. And 
generally, when line power is disrupted, there is a large associated electrical 
surge when the line power either disappears or when it is restored which can 
pass right through these UPS's.

For protection against electrical line surges and noise, either a fairly high 
grade UPS with excellent filtering is required <or> a off-the-shelf UPS used in 
conjunction with a separate power line filter. There are some power outlet 
strips that have a very limited amount of filtering built in. Some power outlet 
manufacturers advertise they will add $xx worth of insurance if there is any 
electrical damage due to power line surges to a device (Disklavier) which was 
plugged into their outlet strip at the time of an electrical surge. Pretty 
difficult to collect on this insurance from what I have been able to find out so 
far. And most of these strips use MOVs for protection along with a bit of noise 
filtering. This is pretty minimal protection.

For my protection, I use a:
http://www.surgex.com/products/sa15_20.html

along with a commercial UPS.

I am an electrical engineer by trade and have done line-level surge/noise 
testing comparing different methods of protection of devices for customers in 
the past.


Danny