Posted: 4/14/2009 3:37:05 PM EDT
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From a conversation with a group (4) of my co-workers at lunch break. The majority said they buy new surge protectors every couple of years, like the packaging suggests. I said I have not ever changed mine, & everything is still protected as long as the light is still on, otherwise why would they give a lifetime warranty with it. I said it is just a marketing scheme to get more business.
So the question here is, who here gets new surge protectors every few years "just in case", & who has not ever replaced a surge protector as long as the light is still on & has never been tripped by a power surge? |
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Quoted: Surge protectors are junk. Most won't toss over before the equipment attached is fried, and they won't protect from dropouts which are as bad for the equipment as surges. I wouldn't rely on them as anything more than extra outlets. This. Most use metal oxide varistors. These "clamp" voltage spikes, dissipating the voltage spike as heat. They will blow with a direct lightning strike. Most computers have switched mode power supplies which do a far better job at clamping voltage spikes in their primary filtering stage capacitors immediately after the rectifier bridge. Because capacitors store charge, they are much less likely to burn out. Instead of dissipating the energy as heat, the voltage spike reduces current after the event. Now how about a battery-backed UPS? Same thing as a SMPS. AC comes in, is transformed, then rectified and run through a capacitor bank before being fed into the H-bridge of the inverter. Surge supressors are junk. |
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Quoted:
The best thing you can do during a lightening event is unplug all your equipment. This includes the internet connection too. Ask me how I know this. You aint kiddin. About 8 years ago I geeked for a college that took a good solid lightning hit on one of the buildings. Final total for just the blown IT equipment was well over $20,000, and most of that was network hardware that caught the surge through the network lines.. Not the power lines. It was the damndest thing I ever did see. You could follow the path of the electricity clearly. Had a switch with say 6 blown ports, the rest worked fine. The computers at the other end of those ports were in all sorts of different states of fucked up. A few just lost their network cards, a few more were net card and motherboard, and a few more were complete losses. Multiply that by ten or so and scatter it through all the buildings on a large campus. Of the stuff that survived, lots of it died in the weeks and months that followed too. That was one hell of a fun time. Water damage is similar in that some stuff survives, some doesn't, and some will die very early afterward. That was a whole 'nother fun time 
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