Disklavier

Greetings Colin,


I live in an area where the power is very nasty. The surges are so
severe that they are called faults, not surges. I did a lot of
research and spoke to engineers at most of the manufacturers of surge
suppressors. Most admitted that their devices would not protect my
equipment. I have had catastrophic failures and major equipment damage
year after year. I finally found a device that I feel offers the
highest degree of protection possible. I was going to try to design a
device myself because it seemed that no one had what I needed.
Fortunately I found something ready made.

If you read the manufacturer's specifications and those of the
manufacturers of MOVs, which are the main device used to provide TVS
(transient (short term) voltage suppression) you will see that these
alone really do very little. MOVs can fail both in a manner that will
render them useless but they can also fail in a manner that renders
them hazardous. I had a fire that was caused by a fused MOV.

Gas discharge devices are not used in line voltage protection devices,
or they were not when I last checked. They are used for protection of
sensitive devices against high voltage spikes in other applications.
The most common is on the signal line of STBs (set top boxes, such as
cable TV boxes). Good luck finding them for line voltage protection.

The device I found differs from the rest in that it disconnects the
load when the line voltage is outside of the safe range. If it is too
high or too low, it disconnects the load including the MOV protection
and inductive clamp device which is also in the protector. This not
only protects the load but the MOV TVS device also.

I bought about $1000 worth of these protective power strips and have
had no damage since then. Usually I average $800 a year in damage but
not since I installed them. I have them on my computers, pianos,
dishwasher, washer and dryer, basically everything with a
microprocessor or microcontroller in it.

I have industrial quality UPSs installed to protect all the computers
and have had damage in spite of them, including damage to the UPSs
themselves. I now have one of these devices protecting my industrial
quality pure sine wave UPS. It survived some serious surges (faults)
last year as did the rest of the protected equipment.

The reason for these faults is the fact that I live in a remote rural
location where the power is provided by a 12 KV distribution located
too close to a 60 KV transmission line. In the winter, the snow
unloads from the 12 KV line and cause it to hit the 60KV line. The
resulting 5 to 1 voltage increase does a lot of damage especially
since there is little distributed load to share the surge and the
surge lasts long enough that few suppressor manufacturers will even
pretend to be able to deal with it. My nearest neighbor is 1/2 mile
away.

Before finding the surge suppressor that disconnects with high (or
low) voltage I regularly had destroyed computers, phone systems, UPSs
etc on the average of once every two years. I was using all the
regular surge suppressors including ones that were quite expensive.
The hardware store variety are total garbage and the stuff from
Monster and the likes are hardly any better. The insurance policies
might make you feel better until you submit a claim. I doubt that the
protected equipment policy would have covered my house that would have
burned down if I hadn't been there when the surge suppressor burst
into flames and set my desk on fire.

I highly recommend the Panamax series of suppressors that offer the
"protect or disconnect" option. This is only available in certain
series of their protectors. Read the specs and choose the right one.

Thursday, March 15, 2007, 6:39:02 PM, you wrote:
>        
>    
>   
>    
>   
> Wanda,
>  
>  If you dont have a surge protector protecting your piano, >RUN<, 
>  dont walk, to your nearest best buy, comp usa, or whatever youve got 
>  and buy a good one.
>  
>  You have a $10,000+ piano. Its worth the 50-100 bucks to protect it 
>  from dirty electricity.
>  
>  go to:
>  
>  http://www.howstuffworks.com/surge-protector.htm
>  

>       
-- 
Best regards,
Spencer_Lists Chase        mailto:lists@...
67550 Bell Springs Rd.
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Laytonville, CA 95454    UPS only.
Spencer@...
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(707) 984-8356