SPD Sure Protection thread

Hah, I have those little Tripp Lite protectors on all of my appliances that cost over $200. My 122 year old house gets plenty of brown outs and the wiring is questionable in some spots.
 
yeah those little tripp lite guys work good. did you have a q or something, or just letting us know?
 
i'm thinking about an info data base kind of like that semi shitty LTT PSU database on thier forum after Johnn Guru whent away. the top sellers on amazon are 800v to 1200v clamping voltage. we need to have place to discuss quality units! These Spikecubes are $10 on provantage. i bought ten lol

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Those Trip Lites don't show up unless you search by "Trip Lite Spikecube" dang near exactly other wise the garbage populates first. Even the Monoprice and Cable Matters units are garbage too. Belkin is better at 400v clamping voltage vs 800+

i'd also like to say these are great put it before a power strip/surge protector and your golden, they are small replaceable. The only limit then is your home or building grounding.

I wonder if we can embed a google doc or libre calc document.
 
Don't worry about it too much. Like many things you can fall down a rabbit hole and start to become overly concerned with specs on things and getting "the best" :). If you want an easy metric then get a UL listed one, with a lower voltage, higher joule rating, from a good brand. Tripplite and APC are both good choices, they make professional equipment as well as home equipment. Of course, that doesn't mean they can't occasionally make garbage too.

Something else to remember, if you are worried about computers, is that the voltage they can handle is more than you'd think. The let through levels are peak, not RMS. so a 120v line is actually 170v peak. Your PSU is also rated for 240v input, more actually, most are rated up in the 260v range which would be 367v peak. That's what they are rated to operate at, they can take a spike higher and survive fine. Not saying a surge protector isn't a good idea, just that while even "330v" might sound like a lot of let through, it really isn't and your computer would probably happily operate on a peak voltage that high.

If you are really concerned you can get series-type non-MOV surge protectors that have much lower clamping. Zero Surge is one company who make them, there are others. They are more or less a big transformer and some caps and such so that it is quite slow to change output voltage. When a spike hits it, it just sorta absorbs it and then slowly releases the energy. The advantages are they have a lower let-through voltage (if that bothers you), and they don't wear out after repeated surges. They also don't need a working ground line to be effective. The disadvantages are they are more expensive and bulky, and they generally only protect the hot-neutral pair, they don't do hot-ground and ground-neutral. You can, of course, stack one of them with a conventional protector if you like.

I would worry though. Unless you live somewhere that does have real surge issues, and most places in the US and Europe really don't, then any decent protector is more than fine, and even none is probably fine. As a simple data point we have a lot of people at work that don't use surge protectors on their computers. They either move it to a new location and don't take it with, or the decide they don't like it on the floor and remove it, and so on. We have yet to see a computer die because of a surge, even given that.

HeavensCloud said:
Hah, I have those little Tripp Lite protectors on all of my appliances that cost over $200. My 122 year old house gets plenty of brown outs and the wiring is questionable in some spots.
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They won't help at all with brownouts and if the ground is bad won't help at all. If you want to deal with brownouts, you need a voltage regulator. Can either be an online UPS that does its own signal, or a transformer that has multiple taps that can step up and down the voltage as needed. Something like this. It's a chonky boi because of the transformer inside of it, but it'll step voltage up, and down, within a range to deal with brownouts or sustained over voltage.

If the wiring is bad and there's no ground, or a flakey one, then you need one of the aforementioned series mode protectors. Normal MOV based protectors basically work by shunting the over current to the ground wire when they clamp. Works great... so long as that wire is present. If it's not, they can't help you.
 
that was nice nugget of info! Also good grounding man. data centers exceed code by miles, some try to go for zero ohm. checking out Zero Surge, the last few names i heard of like Furman ended up being A/V | Audio which means big big big bucks for super basic stuff with lots of empty space inside.

in tornado alley we go a strike so bad it lit the break box up like a 1970s cigarette lighter element cherry red style.

i like the idea of throwing these spike cubes in front power strips, if the strip has some good MOVs great, if they spent i got the spike cube in front. those Zero Surges remind of the stuff grandads old time radio parts collection. i see how big some of those boxes are. the way you describe it reminds of those always UPS that use transformers to transmit the power so the device side circuit is....always live. they burns watts since the transformer is the means of transferring power from AC/DC to AC out device side.


EDIT: man do old forums kick ass.
 
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