Electricity Surge Protection

[goatfarmer]

My house is frequently ravaged power surges with damage to electrical appliances resulting. Does anyone know of a solution? Is there a company that consults and fits equipment that will control the power surges?

[farang62]

Dammage to large applinces is usually caused by low voltage, or short duration, multiple power cuts as in the case of referegrators. A/C units have restart time delays built in, so the compressor has time to equlize it's pressure before it tries to restart after a power cut.

Low voltage takes a tole on most devices with motors like Pumps, fans, A/C's, on pumps like your pool pump it us best to install an undervoltage protector with a adjustable restart delay of at least 15 minutes. Remember I=E divided by R when voltage (E) goes down current (I) goes up the more current the hotter the motor runs, reducing coolong and overloading the motor windings.

Spikes are dangerious to many small devices and power supplies, most are caused be large loads starting or stoping, especially when the voltage is low, the colapsing magnetic field induces a high voltage spike on the power line, we have measured spikes as high as 2,600 volts. These spikes can dammage sensitive electronic devices, especially those cheap ones with no protection built in. We us a lot of micro-controlers and we install a GMOV device across the incoming power line and have vertually stopped dammage to these devices.

If you want to protect your whole house from spikes it is easy and cheap, about 3,500 baht a phase, just install a Square D QO-SPD255 Surge Protective Device on each incoming power line. This device will protect agianst the majority of power line spikes. It will not protect agianst a Lightning Strike or a Large power surge.

It does take care of 90% of the spikes. Square D gives you a 100,000 baht warranty agianst dammage with each unit.

Please remember power line protection is a profession and can become costly for certian installations and devices, but to protect your house it is easy and cheap.

Just a word about computers, most cheap computer power supplies have no surge protection, but we have found that dammage to the mother board is usually caused by a voltage spike on the incoming data/phone line. Think about how electricity and a generator works, now look up and you will see the telephone lines bundled together with the power lines, a surge can and is often couples into the copper phone/data line from the close proximity to the phone line.

Please remember that you need to protect your Desktop PC with a good quality UPS, they don't like spikes or power cuts. We have found aver the years, and in most countries the best protection is a UPS made by APC, we used them in the military, government facalities, all over and never had a failure due to power problems, there is also a telephone protection line built in the unit, use it.

In my home I have never had a failure due to power spikes. Everything is protected house wide and agian it is cheap protection that works.

If you have a power cut and the lights dim and fans run slow, immeciately turn off your main breaker, this low voltage or in many cases loss of the neutral connection by the power company can reak havoc on everything. also consider a Frig protector, it turns off the frig when the voltage is to high, to low or if there is a power cut and when the power comes back on it delays the starting of the frig/appliance for 3-5 minutes before restarting.

Please remember "Nothing Pretects Agianst a Direct or Close proximity Lightning Strike" and remember lightning rods attract lightning, better to be able to send the strike where it can do minimal dammage. Lightning likes High Pointie Things, even wood, so keep things sticking up above your house, low and round.

I hope this helped you to understand how power protection, "basic" works and what you can do to protect your self and your property.

To the experts please accept this explanation as a basic explanation I give my customers, it is not intended to be a Electrical Engineering lesson by any means nor are the spelling or grammer mistakes intended.

have a great weekend everyone

[Crossy]

F62, do you have a local retail chain that carry the Square-D devices?

[longball53098]

I found this on the Schneider web site

http://surgelogic.com/home/solutions/residential/surgebreaker%C2%AE-panelboard-spd.html

[farang62]

Here on Samui, they are carried at Supot Electric as are the Frig protectors and the low voltage protectors

[goatfarmer]

Thanks for this.