Ditek 1 Surge Protection 101

Surge Protection101 White Paper 1 of 2 service life of any piece of electronically controlled equipment is to a large degree determined by the of the electrical service that it receives power from Most electronics have an incredibly long theoretical but a fairly short life This is mainly due to two factors The first and by far the most critical is quality of the supply power The second is environmental actually dust and dirt getting on and in the number one complaint from electronics owners commercial and residential is downtime The number cause of downtime other than user error neglect or abuse is poor power quality According to Utility information power quality is at an all time low and with deregulation rolling along it getting worse today electronics becoming smaller more sensitive and more expensive no one can escape the need quality surge protection Every day hundreds of short duration voltage surges some potentially larger than volts can enter your business These surges are also referred to as or Because last for a very short time generally less than one millisecond 1 1,000 of a second they do not destroy your equipment Sometimes they may only cause your computer screen to flicker Other you may be left with a smoking wreck where your new home theater was The most costly result of small surges is the wear and tear they put on all electronics Electronic equipment can last up to 30 with the proper protection our purposes a surge is defined as a high amplitude short duration electrical fluctuation A surge can be onto ANY metallic conductor Surges can be categorized in two ways Transients also called spikes the events we concerned with These are defined in the sentence above Swells are a rise normal line voltage and require different types of devices to protect equipment are three primary causes of surges and is of course Mother Nature and she is responsible for the most feared and dramatic transients those by lightning While lightning is certainly spectacular only about 2 of surge damage is caused by lightning strikes Lightning hitting the ground can travel up to mile so indirectly it can induce a spike any wiring buried in the ground Static discharge can affect building to building wire runs refers to any source outside of the building or room being analyzed The most common source for surges is the local electric company Major events like grid shifting open neutral events and high cross over can induce large transients onto the power lines Smaller daily events like capacitor are responsible for ongoing degradation of electronics also can be any electric user on the utility circuit from the sub station A large current draw such as a large motor at a gravel plant or the equipment at a school or hospital will create several surges a day as they cycle on and off is the actual owner manager etc of any commercial industrial or residential building or facility Studies GE and the National Power Lab in Kenosha Wisconsin show that between 65 and 80 of all surges are within the facility itself These spikes tend to be rather small and are responsible more for degradation than destruction The primary causes are HVAC equipment pumps and motors pool etc refrigeration equipment anything that on startup has an inrush current greater than it operational Once the device reaches it normal run speed the excess inrush current is reflected back onto the in the form of a transient surge DITEK Center Starkey Road FL 33771 Direct 1 727 812 5000 Support 1 888 472 6100 Number STS 100004 001 Rev 1 10 07 DITEK Corp Subject to Change Protection101 White Paper 2 of 2 surges result in one of three things Degradation and Downtime Destruction is erroneously most people main concern The gradual degradation of equipment causes more replacement and those annoying so prevalent in electronics today Downtime is easily the expensive result of a spike A large brokerage firm loses in excess of 5,000,000.00 an HOUR if their and or internet service goes down due to a surge properly designed surge protection system can protect electronics from most incoming and internally surges See Design 101 In reality the design of the system and the quality of the can be more important than the protector itself See 101 and for Installation of The reason for this is because of how most surge protection works A surge protector sits on a line invisible until it voltage above it rated level It then goes into a low impedance state opening path to ground A surge like all electricity and water for that matter tries to find the of least to ground This is why installation and grounding are such critical components of a surge system Once the transient is safely diverted to ground the protector resets to it passive state and for the next event solid state surge devices will shunt thousands of voltage spikes without suffering any damage When a does self sacrifice it will stay in the shunt to ground mode until disconnected and replaced There really only two things that can damage TVSS equipment The first is a major transient surge larger than device capacity The second as mentioned before is a over voltage situation In either the protector needs to be replaced DITEK Center Starkey Road FL 33771 Direct 1 727 812 5000 Support 1 888 472 6100 Number STS 100004 001 Rev1 10 07 DITEK Corp Subject to Change