Re: House Power Failures and Mac

On Sat, 16 Feb 2008 11:13:57 -0500, bud-- wrote
(in article <9b993$47b70a4d$4213ea7f$13018@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

J.J. O'Shea wrote:
On Fri, 15 Feb 2008 02:26:20 -0500, bud-- wrote
(in article <b852d$47b53d30$4213eb82$4625@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>):
Depending on the quality of electrical service in your area, a
surge protector's MOVs might last 3 years. Or they might last
18 months.
.
Plug-in suppressors are readily available with very high ratings at
relatively low cost. "Grossly undersized" is a red herring. If plug-in
suppressors only last 3 years you are buying junk or are in an extremely
high lightning area.

Bingo. There's a reason why Florida Power & Light is also known as Florida
Flicker & Flash. I saw more surges in my first six months in Florida than
I'd
seen in my last two years in Jamaica, and it's not as though JPS (the
Jamaican power utility) was famous for delivering clean power.

.
Parts of Florida do sound ?exciting?.

If you like thunderstorms. And hurricanes.
[snip]



Like you I would rather have a high rating plug-in suppressor ahead of a
UPS. Plug-in suppressors with very high ratings are readily available. I
would rather not have the UPS try to provide surge protection. Which
unit takes the surge hit is actually determined by the MOV clamp
voltages (which Martzloff says are set unnecessarily low).

That's why I have a surge protector _and_ a UPS. The surge protector is
cheaper than the UPS, and protects it from surges which would destroy it. The
UPS provides battery backup for my computers... and, if a surge gets past the
surge protector, will either stop the surge with its surge protection or burn
before the surge gets to the computers.

As I have _seen_ this happen on several occasions, anyone (such as, oh, a
certain very confused in-duh-vidual) who wants to convince me otherwise has a
very difficult job. Who should I believe, the confused in-duh-vidual or my
eyes? Hey, I could be wrong... but proving it ain't gonna be easy. And his
frothing and ranting without producing a scintilla of support for his
position ain't gonna cut it.

I repeat: my fav example of UPSes doing what I say they do is when that 250
kVA Liebert burned stopping a surge from a near-miss by lightening.

And I find it... odd that power companies use UPSes when a certain
in-duh-vidual says that UPSes don't work. Why on Earth would a power company,
run by people who presumably know how electrical power systems work, waste
their money on something which doesn't work? Unless, of course, there's a
problem with the in-duh-vidual's thesis, and UPSes _do_ work the way that I
think they do...


--
email to oshea dot j dot j at gmail dot com.

.

Relevant Pages

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