What is Digg?59 Comments
- coldmeat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I have worked in a PC repair shop in a area with extremely 'bad' power and I find that article itself to be incredibly misleading. I have seen many machines damaged from power surges through both the phone line and the power lines. Further more, each machine that came in was not connected via any form of surge protection and we never had one come in that was.
- bluedepth, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Written by Wendell H. Laidley, President, Zero Surge Inc.
Aw... ain't it cute, I bet a certain someone is trying to sell us "A solution that works!"... - chrislewis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Sorry to double post but yes, here it is: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,116572,pg,5,00.asp
"And don't get caught up in the energy dissipation (most often expressed in joules) and response time features that some surge protectors tout, Wilson advises; they're not a reliable indication of quality. Instead, just make sure that the surge protector is UL 1449 rated, which means that it meets the Underwriter Laboratory's tested standard." - aggrazel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Dunno, if you read the article you get the idea that the $3 hardware store surge protector is just as good as anything else, so why not use that? Not a very good sales pitch if he's trying.
- Bluejaye, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"Written by Wendell H. Laidley, President, Zero Surge Inc.
Aw... ain't it cute, I bet a certain someone is trying to sell us "A solution that works!"... "
And just who do you think would write an article about power/surge protection, an engine mechanic? Are you shocked when doctors write papers/articles pertaining to medicine? - Swift2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Still, I'm keeping my APS unit. I've fried a couple of boards with bad power, so I'll take what I can afford. Sorry I can't own my own power generating station next door, but there you go. Besides, when I blow a fuse, it's real nice to have it shut down on its own, politely.
- SDawg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Well a UPS will protect against brown outs( partial outages ). Surges from lightning is not the only issue with electronic components. If your power goes partially out the amps in your electric lines will go up significantly, causeing serious damage and will not be caught by any surge protection. The only way to fix this issue is with a UPS that conditions the power before it reaches your computer. I believe anyone without some sort of surge protection is asking for trouble. This atricl is misleading. NO DIGG!!!!!
- 0xdeadbeef, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I think this is mostly BS. We recently had a "surge protector test" at our house, courtesy of the local power company. Transformer fell off the pole, delivered about 3 seconds of 12KV to our house. Every unprotected device was damaged (including the GFIs, light bulbs, etc) and not a single bit of equipment that had a surge protector was damaged. Even the cheapest surge protectors worked in this case! And, every single surge protector was found to be shorted after the event. So, they gave their little lives to protect my gear. My UPS (which was not plugged into a surge protector) was damaged too. Fortunately the damage was (can you guess?) a shorted MOV in the UPS, so, snip snip, back to work!
Anyway, my first hand experience: even a cheap MOV based surge protector is better than nothing. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That list is a bunch of BS. I, as many of you, know from REAL WORLD eperience the benefits of having a UPS.
Diverts to Data lines my ass... and btw the switches and routers on my network are all on a huge UPS along with the servers. It can last around 6 hours... - manfesto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Huh, I've learned a few things.
I have a UPS, not because I'm worried about a surge burning out any of my electronics (I've had enough brownouts over the years with zero damage to any of my belongings - I've learned not to fear them but to react with extreme annoyance), but because I don't feel like having a bad crash in the middle of doing something important. The five minutes my UPS gives me is time enough to save work and shut down, and not have to worry about how well the computer is going to recover. That to me is worth $40.
As for people throwing money at giant UPSs and such, they'd do well to read this list. - buddyfarr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"COMPUTER MODEM DAMAGE IS CAUSED BY SURGES ON THE PHONE LINE.
The phone line is a high-impedance circuit which cannot support high energy surges, so they die away rapidly after the inducing source (e.g., lightning) disappears"
what a bunch of BS. I have seen several computers damaged by surges coming via phone lines. yes they are not built to support high energy surges but when lightning hits the pole it takes whatever path it finds to try to get to ground. in my area lightning and bad power are very common. I have always used a surge protector and will continue to use one. I have had several fried, but it is better to go out and buy a new one for $30 or $40 than to buy a new computer. I had a VERY expensive tripp-lite that cost about $70 get hit by surge via phone line and it melted the phone line protection inside the tripp-lite. but my PC was fine and the outlets still worked on the surge protector. went and bought a new one anyway but it was worth it. - DarkHorizon5, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Jumping in on the BS bandwagon. He really ought to defend his points. How do these surge protectors divert surges into the data lines? That makes no sense at all!
It's not like I've got my data lines running through my power lines (actually... that's a different story, but not associated with my UPS/surge protectors at all). - TomJ, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I think that this article will only serve to confuse the masses and annoy the knowledgeable.
- Obvioustroll, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1 "Surge suppressors work by shunting the surges onto data lines."
WTF?
And here I thought they worked by shunting the surge to ground. Who ever wrote that article has never taken a class on electricity in their life. - TeamATi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1As a phone system installer, I constantly deal with Ma Bell and I can tell you first hand that they don't always have a primary protection like gas protectors on your phone lines. Practice safe Telephony! Use Surge protectors!
On another note, most UPS's have line conditioning built in as well, that protects against under/overvoltage.
Article is complete BS. "Written by Wendell H. Laidley, President, Zero Surge Inc."
"Buy our $200 surge protection! It's the only thing that will work!"
No Digg. - runner1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I also call BS on the no surge from phone lines! EVERY repair that has ever come into my shop for lighting damage has been either for the modem or network card. I have a stack of blown and burned modems that I can prove to this guy that surges do infact com through the phone line!
- tsbardella, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I just wrap gum wrappers arround the prongs before I insert them into the wall then when the smoke stops I know I have a good connection.
- chuckw, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Ummm wow, does the person who wrote that article know the first thing about electricity? Most of what he says is blatantly incorrect. For example "since shunt surge suppressors divert power line surges into data lines". What planet do you have to be on to believe that?
- FuManchu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1BTW, seriously, I do agree with runner1.
If phone-line power surges were non-existent, my phone company would not have a specific clause in their service contract denying liability in the event that a phone-line power surge damages my equipment. - driverseven, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0You mean I really don't have to spend $200 for a Monster power strip??!?
Now you tell me ! - MrMysterious, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I"ve seen plenty of fried modems. I used to work in a computer store and after every storm I'd sell out of modems.
- 70ny, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Those who don't know the value of a UPS have never been saved by a UPS.
- riddlebox, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1totse.com:D
a lot of stuff on there dealing with modem hacking, and other cable hacks. - cbreaker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0While I do believe that most inexpensive surge protector/suppressor devices won't help in a large enough surge, they can help with smaller surges that can affect devices that don't necessarily have the same level of semi-immunity as a full-on ATX power supply.
This article seems to be aimed at folks that already have some experience with the technical aspects of surge protection and for a more general audience some of the terms and concepts should be qualified and explained.
Or it could be a bunch of marketing bs. - spjmm0, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0so the question is: What is best? I myself trust UPS's, maybe I am an idiot for doing so but I know that there are brownouts even in the metro area I live in.
- CoolWind, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0From experience it is important to have surge protection for both your power lines and your phone/DSL lines.
Would it help to plug a UPS into a surge protector? - master_of_fm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Myth #8. THE ONLY RISK FROM THE POWER LINE IS HARDWARE DAMAGE.
complete BS, especially if you are working with a RAID array. if you have a power surge while in the middle of transferring data and one of the drives gets taken out in the process, it can screw synchronization and you can lose data. also this is why a lot of high end RAID cards have battery backups on them to hold data in the onboard cache so that if there is a power loss you dont lose that data.
also back when I was a bench tech saw power surges that the power supply took the full force of the surge and other cases where everything in the computer died from a surge. also going backing to data loss, a power surge would actually cause the data on a hard drive to be lost per se. it could burn out the controller card, but if your drive is somewhat older you wont be able to find a replacement controller card to recover your data. which effectively results in data loss.
for a computer the best things to do to protect you from a power surge is to make sure that you have a good quality power supply like Antec, Enermax, Seasonic, or my personal fav PC Power and Cooling (they are built like tanks). Make sure that the wiring in you house is up to code. My old place had a serious ground fault, whenever i when to reattach the coax for my cable to a TV I always got a nice little shock. And as a testament to surge protectors I had a squirrel chew through the common lead to my house and I had 220volts go to every outlet in the house, the only thing I had to replace was a handful of plug strips. so put that in your pipe and smoke it. - The_Dude, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'll never run without my beefy APC UPS again. One little power blip through my old wiring and the registry gets corrupted. Repair installs are a a drag. I was also able to keep browsing along during a recent power outtage.
- andreo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'm glad I'm not the only one scratching his head over this article. I thought I was going nuts when I couldn't figure out how he concluded that a surge protector diverts surges to the data lines of network instead of the ground. And the statement that no spikes could come over a phone line really sent me for a loop.
- MrMysterious, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Chuck Norris once caused every computer in NYC to short circuit when he flossed his teeth with the high voltage power lines.
- MasterDwarf, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Interesting, but I have to agree with some other responses that surge protectors do something because many incidents of computer repair that I have dealt with had one thing in common, no surge protection. It was either lack of electrical or phone or both.
Its like this guy just did a term paper on the subject. Nice use of fancy terms and explanations. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0i guess it is just coinincidence that i get so many broken modem calls right after a major thundar storm.. Must be the rain infiltrating the modem lines.. rain can travel eltromagnetically, cant it?
Lame - doffy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1This article is great, and it makes me feel less bad about not having an UPS..
;) - chrislewis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I remember reading something about the rise time and maximum energy dissipation not being important, but some sort of underwriting?
- Mauz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0As I understand it, all electronic equipment is designed for a fixed range of voltages across its supplies (VDD, GND). If this voltage range is exceeded, expensive smoke can occur as insulators break down (short) and other nastiness occurs. The best protection is to dump the excess charge into the opposite supply. This causes both supplies to see the voltage bump (common mode) which protects the circuits. This can cause problems for circuits which share one supply (GND) but not the other (VDD) when the surge comes in on VDD. Suddenly, your surge protector dumps the extra charge onto GND and because GND has some impedance and can't just magically make the charge instantaneously disappear, it causes local GND to move. If the third supply (VDD2?) does not have a surge suppressor between it and GND, bad things could happen between VDD2 and GND. Or so I have observed.
I think the biggest take away is to use a surge suppressor. After blowing up several cable and POTS modems, along with various bits of equipment down stream from said modems, I also have surge clamps on these lines as well. - Kitsune818, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0In the past year I lost 5 Power supplies (Antecs, mostly, 350 Watts and above, with about 140 Watt measure load from the computer), 3 motherboards, and 2 CPUs to bad power. Turns out I'm on the same transformer as the autobody shop down the street, and their welder makes the nice 60hz AC Sine wave look like the Alps.. at the same time causing wide swings in voltage. After the addition of an APC 1200 and a Monster Power conditioner intended for Home Theater, I barely notice ripple, noise, or voltage change at all at the PSU. Before applying that conditioning, My 12v and 5v rail would fluctuate by large amounts, and almost all the PSUs died from a failure of the 5v regulator. Yeah, it was a bit expensive (although I got a good deal on the Monster unit) but less expensive than replacing all that hardware. Not everyone has power as bad as mine, but the assertions of this article are just rediculous and are apparently written by someone without the slightest clue as to what they are talking about (How, exactly, is an overvoltage condition being shunted to my data lines?? Magic? Why, then, does the voltage to ground change in direct proportion to the overvoltage condition?) I'm not an EE, but my father is and he did most of the grunt work figuring this one out.. still, if the author of the article would like to back up what he's talking about, he's welcome to borrow my multimeter and 'scope :/
- velocipenguin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@tomj:
Right on. Most of this article was insultingly inaccurate. The author clearly doesn't understand electricity in the slightest. - gordie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0>>Would it help to plug a UPS into a surge protector?
It will usually void your warranty and some have reporter catastrophic UPS failures when doing this. I am only guessing that mismatched surge supressors actually cause the down stream device to overheat.
While not total BS read the article with a healthy dose of scepticism as the point is to sell product. Under certain conditions some the things covered are valid. - sherad, on 11/13/2007, -0/+0An appliance tripped our breaker box last week, giving a violent electrical surge. With a bit of cunning I isolated the problem back to our Whirlpool washing machine (which is now dead - a new Miele on the way).
It seems most of my appliances are ok, but the surge knocked my SpeedTouch wireless router in to a coma - taking hours for it to slowly recover... and even then I think it's damaged cause it fully resets and loses all it's WPA settings (ect) if you turn now it off at the power button. Now I'm seeking out a few extra decent Surge Protecter outlets for around the house. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'll give it a reluctant Digg - some of it is accurate, some is wildly off target. I'll only Digg it because it might bring the concept of power line protection to a wider audience.
There's a lot of nonsense about mains supply spikes being passed to comms ports - there's more chance of induced spikes on to the cabling.
Most cheap computer PSUs (even the very cheapest) will actually prove VERY resistant to mains spikes, and anything big enough to be passed to the computer itself wil kill the PSU stone dead BEFORE damage can happen!
The writer of the article needs to do a little more research.... - adm58, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Can anyone explain a little bit about what the best surge protection technique would be? This isn't exactly my area of expertise and I was hoping this article would give me some answers, but it really didn't.
- stalinvlad, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Im in a state of fear uncertainty and lots of doubt
- gordie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Can anyone explain a little bit about what the best surge protection technique would be? This isn't exactly my area of expertise and I was hoping this article would give me some answers, but it really didn't.
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No because it depends on the application, but let's assume it's the typical home user with a wireless network. Metal Oxide varistors (MOVs) are the most cost effective but buy a model that can indicate when they fail. Since they can fail open you may never know it and you are then unprotected. Then you get into how much energy shuld the unit be able to absorb. Generally bigger is better but it may have a tendancy to let faster transients thru. Without details of the design you won't know this either. A UPS is often lower in energy surge rating than a surge supressor, but there are other things involved there which make it as good or better than a higher rated surge suppressor. howstuffworks.com is a good place to look and APC has numerous FAQ and white papers to read.
Now, as for voltage spikes getting on the data lines there is an instance where this is a concern. Particularly vulnerable would be a wired network in a fairly large office. A voltage spike on one computer will raise the potential of that entire computer, including the data lines, relative to the others. So there is a chance in this case that there can be damage to one or more computers. Given that interfaces like Ethernet are designed to handle this circumstance the chance of this being an issue is pretty low.
I hope this helps a little, is accurate, and clear.
PS - this captcha thing is a pain. I won't be postinbg anymore because I can't seem to read it correctly. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0lol it was written for totse.com what do you expect a Stanford worthy paper? I think not...
- LeegleechN, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I always cringe when I see the $100 Monster surge protectors that offer no better performance than $10 products.
- tkdan235, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0something about the way this was written is so annoying I couldn't read it. ugh...
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0wow, that is by far the stupidest thing i have ever read, Everyone on digg is now dumber for having read it. I award you no
points, and may God have mercy on your soul. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0My former office location (we just moved) was next to a power transfer station for light rail lines in Portland Oregon. We would frequently see CRT's blank/get out of sync out when trains passed by, and 20% failure on hard drives, until we added 500VA UPS's to every CPU/Monitor. We had several electricians stop by, and basically tell us to move, because a combination of the wiring, and the arcing of power with these trains was murder on our electronics. However the UPS's we installed dramatically helped. It was a $4000 investment that more than paid for itself.
- Sell, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Well that was a pretty boring read.
- jsh1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I know 50 other people already have done this, but I'm calling BS as well on a lot of this.
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