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[Martin Dornfeld]

Here's another question from CSC

Mike

Are Furman and Juice Goose power conditioners also surge protectors, or are
both conditioners and protectors needed together? How do UPS units fare at
these jobs? What's the hookup order if all are needed?

Some folks equate power conditioning to voltage regulation, but power conditioning generally refers to a solution that provides surge protection and additional “conditioning” such as AC noise filtering.  UPS products, including double conversion online units, are great for providing steady power when the voltage is unstable, or there is a power outage.  However, they are not designed to handle major surges, and they do little (if anything) to address issues like common mode noise.  My recommendation is to put a SurgeX surge eliminator/power conditioner in front of the UPS.  We actually offer bundled solutions that include both the UPS and one of our surge eliminator/power conditioners.

[Tim McCulloch]

Some folks equate power conditioning to voltage regulation, but power conditioning generally refers to a solution that provides surge protection and additional “conditioning” such as AC noise filtering.  UPS products, including double conversion online units, are great for providing steady power when the voltage is unstable, or there is a power outage.  However, they are not designed to handle major surges, and they do little (if anything) to address issues like common mode noise.  My recommendation is to put a SurgeX surge eliminator/power conditioner in front of the UPS.  We actually offer bundled solutions that include both the UPS and one of our surge eliminator/power conditioners.

Hi Martin, and welcome to the forum.

I appreciate that you might be inclined to say "My recommendation is to put a SurgeX surge eliminator/power conditioner in front of the UPS" as that's who you work for.  However most of the readers here have no exposure to the technology used to address power issues beyond the binary "it works - or not."

Rather than a blanket recommendation via a generic brand reference (there is more than 1 SurgeX product), how about discussing what constitutes "power quality", the effects of certain PQ aspects on the kinds of equipment we use, and how SurgeX addresses those issues.  It's fair to talk about what can't be fixed at various spending levels and to compare other technologies purported to "condition" power.

Thanks for your participation, have fun!

Tim Mc

[Mike Sokol]

MOV based "surge suppressors", whether $10 strip, or higher end rack-mount product, will shunt surge energy to either the neutral, or ground....

Hey Martin... You're not due to start answering questions until your LED Talk begins next Monday. I'll start a new thread for you at that time and then you can start your official LED Talk. I think you're going to have some interesting information for everyone here. 

[Mike Sokol]

Never having bothered to take the case off one, my WAG is that the led is downstream of the MOV, so that if/when the MOV is dead, no more little green light. "Dead" versus "not completely dead" isn't much of a test, but arguably better than nothing.  I look forward to being educated by SurgeX. Mark C.

Interesting, isn't it? I've personally seen one MOV protected power strip with the MOV shorted out by a nearby lightning strike. In that case the circuit breaker wouldn't reset since it was seeing the shorted MOV. But I believe that a bunch of lesser spikes would open up the MOV. If so, then your hypothesis could be correct. So another question for SurgeX would be exactly HOW do MOV devices fail most of the time? Shorted or Open or something else?

[Jonathan Johnson]

Refer to the diagram below. It's been about 10 years ago, so I don't recall many details, but one of my customers suffered a fair amount of damage during a thunderstorm. A significant surge propagated through their network across several buildings on campus, damaging several network devices. I don't know where the surge entered the system.

They have since done some rebuilding, so the server closet is now electrically isolated from the rest of the campus by fiber. However, the remainder of the infrastructure is still in place, and several buildings are still connected by copper wire. You'll notice from the diagram that buildings "A" and "B" are connected by short-haul DSL modems using a copper pair from the telephone system. Buildings "B" and "C" are connected by 10Base2 coax. These connections are still vulnerable; what solutions could we implement to prevent a future lightning strike from propagating from building to building and causing similar damage?

Replacing the links with fiber would be prohibitively expensive. The entire campus -- a heavy industrial manufacturing facility -- is paved. There are city streets between some of the buildings, making permitting difficult. We may end up installing WiFi links at some point.

Even though my application is a computer network, the concept could still apply to a large installed or temporary audio system. For example, if lightning strikes on or near a signal line, the voltage spike can come "in the back door" and no amount of fancy power supply protection will help.

[Mike Sokol]

Hey Martin... You're not due to start answering questions until your LED Talk begins next Monday. I think you're going to have some interesting information for everyone here. 

Everyone: I'm going to simply rename this initial announcement thread and see how it works for the talk. That should simplify replying to questions with quotes.

Martin: Your LED Talk begins now and runs until midnight on Aug 24th. At that time I'll ask everyone to wrap it up and I'll lock this thread. Thanks so much for participating in our LED Talks. I'm sure we're all going to learn a lot about your technology.

Mike Sokol

[Mike Sokol]

The SurgeX LED Talk begins today and they will monitor and answer your posts about surge protection for a period of one week, until midnight Aug 24th.

Martin Dornfeld, Northern Regional Manager and Director of Consultant Engagement for SurgeX will be leading this discussion. Let's use this important resource to our advantage and educate ourselves about surge technology in general and SurgeX products that are useful to the pro-sound and lighting industries. Also, please use this opportunity to offer suggestions about features you would would like to see in future SurgeX products. This is a two-way street, so let's get busy and learn some important stuff. 

Martin, welcome to the LED Talks...

Mike Sokol

[Scott Hofmann]

The SurgeX LED Talk begins today and they will monitor and answer your posts about surge protection for a period of one week, until midnight Aug 18th.

Wow, that is sure a short "week".... Aug 18 to midnight Aug 18.

[Mike Sokol]

Wow, that is sure a short "week".... Aug 18 to midnight Aug 18.

Oops.... That would be until Aug 24th. Duh!!! 

[Mike Sokol]

Some folks equate power conditioning to voltage regulation, but power conditioning generally refers to a solution that provides surge protection and additional “conditioning” such as AC noise filtering.  UPS products, including double conversion online units, are great for providing steady power when the voltage is unstable, or there is a power outage.  However, they are not designed to handle major surges, and they do little (if anything) to address issues like common mode noise.  My recommendation is to put a SurgeX surge eliminator/power conditioner in front of the UPS.  We actually offer bundled solutions that include both the UPS and one of our surge eliminator/power conditioners.

Martin: Can you show a typical example of a surge eliminator / power conditioner. I think that most of use here are worried about protecting our digital mixing consoles which are likely under 1,000 watts power draw. They don't need to have a lot of battery backup time, just a few minutes should be sufficient for most live sound applications.

[ProSoundWeb Community]