Electric shock from the power plant

  • Thread starter Thread starter Man-wai Chang ToDie (33.6k)
  • Start date Start date
Man-wai Chang ToDie (33.6k) said:
Do you install special protective circuit at your home
to prevent an erratic surge from the electricity
generator? :)
Click to expand...

Or maybe one caused by a sleepy technician doing electricity
work at the building's wiring room... He/She could make a
mistake (deliberately or not) and fried your home's
electrical appliances. :)

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Man-wai Chang ToDie (33.6k) said:
Do you install special protective circuit at your home
to prevent an erratic surge from the electricity
generator? :)
Click to expand...

An example of one way to filter all the AC feeding your
facility, would be a motor-generator set. You would purchase
a size of motor and generator, to handle the peak expected
electricity usage in the house.

http://www.electricpowergenerator.com/motor-generator-sets.html

The motor runs on the utility power side. The generator
is connected to the shaft of the motor. You can do cool
things, like convert single phase power coming into
the house, into three phase power. Some guys, who have
large lathes or other shop tools, use a motor-generator
to create the three phase power they need, to run the
large motor on the lathe.

But most people don't protect their whole premises
against such faults. A UPS can be used to protect
a computer. A good UPS might be used to protect
an expensive home theater system. But for things
like protecting your washer and dryer, the
furnace in the basement, those are mainly unprotected.
As it would cost too much to protect them completely,
against all possible faults.

Paul
 
Man-wai Chang ToDie (33.6k) said:
Do you install special protective circuit at your home
to prevent an erratic surge from the electricity generator? :)
Click to expand...

My home insurance company wants me to use protection consisting of a
master surge protector inside the main circuit breaker box and plug-in
surge protectors for things like the home entertainment system and
computers. Of these, I suspect that only the protector in the circuit
breaker box will prevent damage caused by surges from the power
company, but I don't know.

Surge protectors can vary a lot in quality. The worst will have only
one MOV, while the minimally acceptable ones will have two more MOVs,
each wired between one of the lines and ground. But it's even better
if the protector also contains a choke-capacitor (L-C filter) to
reduce lower voltage surges and current surges, which MOVs won't
touch. An L-C filter can prevent a computer from crashing when a
motor, fluorescent lamp, or laser printer turns on, as I learned
personally.

AFAIK, all battery backup power supplies contain a surge protector,
but again, it can vary in quality. Here's the one in my Belkin 375VA
unit. The protector is at the left, next to the boxy yellow
capacitor, and seems to consist of just a blue MOV across the lines
and a pair of line-ground green MOVs (which look more like ceramic
disk capacitors to me):

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2336/2067393081_7b6d306053_b.jpg

When I used this backup supply, one of my computers always crashed
when the laser printer turned on, so I substituted a Conext/APC 325VA,
which does contain an L-C filter (left side), and the printer no
longer crashed the computer:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/64/163833271_c6978a0379_o.jpg

A true uninterruptible power supply, or UPS, would probably protect
better than either of these simple backup supplies because an UPS
isolates its AC outputs from the household current through a battery
and a DC-AC converter circuit.
 
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