by Nyal Mellor
April 08, 2013
Simply put, a surge protective device (SPD) is a device designed to protect against damaging and dangerous short, high voltage transients that are created by devices outside or inside the home or studio.
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by Nyal Mellor
April 08, 2013
UL1449 3rd Edition is the UL’s Standard for Safety for Surge Protective Devices (SPDs). All surge protectors should be UL listed for safety purposes. UL listed devices undergo a number of tests to ensure they do not create any shock or fire hazards throughout their working life.
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by Nyal Mellor
April 08, 2013
A whole house surge protector is a device connected at your service panel that provides protection from ‘big’ surges such as lightning strikes.
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by Nyal Mellor
April 08, 2013
Shunt mode surge protectors are typically based on circuits that contain metal oxide varistor (MOVs) which, under normal operating voltages, act as an open circuit and allow no current to flow through them.
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by Nyal Mellor
April 08, 2013
Series mode surge protectors use a large, carefully designed inductor in the hot or live circuit and other circuitry to roll off high frequency / high rate of change transients.
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by Nyal Mellor
April 08, 2013
The term power conditioner has a very loose definition in the industry. We define a power conditioner as anything that is used to improve power quality.
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by Nyal Mellor
April 08, 2013
A passive device is anything that doesn’t contain any powered electronic circuitry. Examples of passive devices include isolation transformers, surge protectors and resistor-inductor-capacitor (RLC) type conditioners. Power re-generators and UPS systems are active devices.
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by Nyal Mellor
April 08, 2013
Isolation transformers are oversized, specially designed versions of the transformers found in linear power supplies. They are called isolation transformers because there is no direct electrical connection through an isolation transformer (excepting safety ground).
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by Nyal Mellor
April 08, 2013
A UPS is a device that provides battery power to connected electronics in the event of a power outage. There are three different types of UPS systems: standby, line interactive and online ‘dual conversion’.
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by Nyal Mellor
April 08, 2013
All devices with spinning hard drives - computers, music servers, home automation systems, etc should be on a UPS.
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by Nyal Mellor
April 08, 2013
Without a UPS the projector lamp and electronics can overheat leading to failure and shortened lifespan.
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by Nyal Mellor
April 08, 2013
How much power does the UPS need to supply? Does the UPS output a true or stepped sine wave? What is the audible noise level? What is the level of powerline noise on the input and output sides of the UPS?
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