PC hardware forum: Do surge protectors merely give us a false sense of security?

> Most quality SP will also include a circuit breaker that will open at the leading edge
> of the surge spike VERY quickly.

A 15 amp breaker trips in milliseconds. If current is 20 amps, tripping might take up to an hour. Circuit breakers never protect electronics. Breakers disconnect AFTER damage has occurred. To protect human life.

Apparently, you have confused the 15 amp breaker with a thermal fuse. A protector contains a thermal fuse (typically rated about 1 amp) to disconnect protector parts (MOVs) as fast as possible. If that thermal fuse does not disconnect fast enough, than a protector (in rare cases) causes a house fire.

A thermal fuse disconnects MOVs as fast as possible. But leaves the appliance connected to that surge. No problem. Better protection is already inside the appliance. So a grossly undersized protector fails to also promote more sales.

Or did you think a millimeters gap in a breaker would stop what three miles of sky could not? Due to advertising, many also make that assumption.

that this was the same system old rotary phones used, and when our phone line blew up one stormy day, the telephone was undamaged, and we used it for another 20 years until touch tone phones came out. Bear in mind - the cable was completely vaporized all the way to the phone, and nothing but burn marks were left on the wall where the phone line used to be!

Hey bud I'm not disputing anything you say'n, I'm just relating real experience. I know nothing that can protect against direct hit by lightning. But in the hundreds of remote offices I maintained, we ended our problem by using dial up adapters with disconnect switches. These units also had onboard DSP to take the load off the CPU and operating system(XP at the time).

We NEVER had a problem with lightning strike from then on - I don't know what else anyone can say after that, other than I believe what I see with my own eyes! The rotary phone line blew up right in front of my eyes, and the wall looked like someone used blasting cord to light up the phone, but the phone was totally undamaged. When we asked the telephone technician about how this happened, he said just the same thing I related about the spring loaded cutoff switch in the phone. This switch would not close unless it received a ring signal from the outside box, then it would stay energized until one hung-up the phone. It is pretty hard not to believe what I saw right in front of my own eyes - you are free to believe what you want.

@dgodbey -- Look at this from an electronics frequency perspective. A coil is inductive and a low pass frequency filter. Meaning that it will allow lower frequencies depending on its specs and design, to pass through. Capacitors are high pass frequency filters.
AC electricity is at 60 Hz frequency as the norm for the US. A spike is a short burst...high frequency current.

I think it's appropriate to provide a guide as to the power in a lightning bolt. First though, to clear up the point about the direction of the electrical flow in a lightning strike. It is from the ground up to the clouds: the flash though, appears to travel in the opposite direction - that's because you're seeing the white hot heat travelling down the connected path of the electrical discharge. Second, the quantity of power in one bolt of lightning is more than enough power to supply a large city like New York or LA America for over a year. This fact caused a university (I think in LA) to build a huge storage facility in a hillside designed to capture the electrical power. It was made up of thousands of appropriate capacitors able to accept a massive amount of electricity. It was all blown to bits by a single lightning bolt. So the amount of power I've quoted here is definitely an under-estimate.

I guess I'm wrong about fiber optics sheathing and core.
do let us know if something happens please.
I don't like to trust stuff too much, it is like teller machines (haven't had anything go wrong yet).
it is why they have a plan b, or calculate trajectories from more than one vantage point.
I still rather unplug electrical items in storms.

As fiber optic is glass, and glass is an insulator, lightening power can't travel that route. There is also no actual power in the cable bundle, however, just grounded shielding. The wire imbedded in the cable is simply to provide shield interconnect at transceiver locations. There is no actual voltage in the cable except possibly differences in ground potential variances that are most carefully eliminated.

Each transceiver in the fiber loop equates to a light source to 'push' the signal forward and a detector for the incoming signal. The device is grounded so heavily, there is virtually no chance a lightening surge will get through. You might lose the transceiver, but that's about all, and even then the device would have to receive a direct hit to do much of anything.

After being involved in installing thousands of miles of fiber (both inside and out), I think I am qualified to respond this way.

NOTE: Fiber optic cabling is not shielded inside of a building, just a single strand of glass and a plastic sleeve to reduce abrasion of the strand. Nothing conductive at all. If it isn't conductive, it's impossible to induce electric current in it.

Living in Johannesburg, South Africa teaches you something about lightning to say the least. Once saw a house where every single gadget was fried - with the main isolation/earth leakage switched off in the DB! As a handyman, I researched lightning to protect security gate motors. Got to the company Surgetek. www.surgetek.co.za. This is no advertisement. I am not connected to them in any way. Just trying to help. They import the DEHN range from Germany. Besides this, that site has many other products to be considered. All in Europe.

There are six layers of protection under their consideration. It isn't lightning that does the damage. The Earth acts like a capacitor or battery with a potential difference. That explains the warning from olden day farmers not to touch the fence in a thunderstorm. You cause the short circuit with the fence to the upcountry potential difference miles away. Your equipment gets hit from Below! not from above.

The technology under discussion; however; goes fully open circuit when "hit by lightning". Saw an example of such. The house remained intact. Point. The potential difference remains although the lightning may have "disappeared". You first need to equalize this before your equipment will be safe.

I stumbled upon this blog and I find that this is a very good forum to get people to know what is real and what is not regarding SPD (Surge Protection Devices). I am not sure if anyone of you guys out there have heard of this popular surge protector named "Cal-Lab Lightning Isolators" that we Malaysians are using for our home and office equipment, whether thunderstorm or not.These particular "surge isolators" are quite popular in Malaysia. This company claims that they have sold over 1 million units and no equipment failure reported. Mmm.... True or Not?
Find out for yourself at: cal-lab dot com

I have also read about this product from this link: http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/272679

Kind regards.

Money says little about a protector's quality. Informed consumers view numeric specifications. For example, Monster sells for $85 a protector circuit equivalent to what Wal-Mart sells for $7. Mostly because advertising and not science promoted these things.

How to identify an inferior protector. 1) It has no dedicated wire for the always short connection to single point earth ground. 2) Manufacturer does not discuss earthing.

Monster has a long history of identifying scams. Then selling an equivalent product for even higher profits by making it look expensive. Routine and easy because most foolishly use price to judge quality. The least informed recommendation will not provide any spec numbers. How many joules will that protector absorb?

Just as ridiculous are recommendations that say a UPS is superior. Again, read its manufacturer spec numbers. Why does a UPS typically have number even tinier than a power strip? And still many say it is better?

A superior protection systems costs about $1 per protected appliance. Spending $85 per appliance suggests that consumer could easily be scammed by hearsay, rumor, urban myth, and advertising.

Protection is always about where hundreds of thousands of joules dissipate. Read spec numbers. And learn what makes better protection. A protector is only as effective as its earth ground.

I'm impressed -- "absorb 6000 volt surges all day long without degrading from use" with outside (IEEE) research showing 6000 V was the highest found inside a structure, 10 year warranty, instantaneous response, no-maximum Joule rating, no damage from MOVs contaminating ground lines, etc. -- by the Brick Wall brand "Series Mode Surge [Suppressor & Powerline] Filter", with NO sacrificial-MOV, manufactured by Price Wheeler Corp.

http://www.sellcom.com/brickwall.html#Order had the above, & LOTS MORE, technical information & understandable interpretations, & LOWER PRICES than the BrickWall.com site, and my unit was drop-shipped via UPS from the manufacturer. Other than being a customer, I have no connection with either company.

I have some sort of "whole house" protector an electrician installed, & electrical grounds to a deeply buried copper rod just outside the house near the breaker box, & to the water pipe near where it surfaces inside the house in the crawl space. (Because the Brick Wall "does not rely on the ground circuit", I suppose this grounding is not as crucial as with Metal Oxide Varistors (MOVs) -- rather the Brick Wall merely must be plugged into a "properly polarized" outlet, which I suppose means proper grounding must be operating.) My Brick Wall model PR2R15 is plugged into a grounded wall socket, then a huge APC brand Uninterruptable Power Supply is plugged into the Brick Wall (thus the UPS etc. are "behind" a Brick Wall... cute huh!}. The UPS has a www-telephone-line protection circuit (which sellcom.com also sells as a separate, seemingly-more-powerful, unit). And even with all this protection, I still have backups, & shut down my system when I can.

Hello everybody,

it's interesting that noone has stressed the need for complex lightning protection, at least noone has gone into deeper details. I am no expert myself, but I do know the basics, because I do deal with antenna stuff marginally, both on the job and as a hobby. Let me explain a bit about how lightning protection is dealt with here where I live = in Europe, across the pond.

Call us over-regulated, but we do have actual *technical norms* regulating how lightning protection should be built - mandatory for newly built buildings, and a good idea for any other house. I believe the number is EN 62305 or IEC 62305. Did someone mention Dehn und Sohne, the German vendor of lightning-protection gear and surge arrestors? I believe they're a major contributor to the norm. Even if this is a bit of a vested interest, I'm glad to have Dehn research this stuff.

The concept of complex (literally "coordinated") lightning protection of a building breaks the problem down into two parts:
1) outside lightning protection (the rods and collection conductors, plus their grounding)
2) surge protection for sensitive equipment inside.

For the outside protection, the norm specifies what the outside collection system should look like - how dense a network of down-conductors / collectors, how thick conductors to use, how many collection rods... for instance, the down-conductors should be spaced no further apart than 10 m (I believe), which means that a mid-size family house will have four, rather than just two, down-conductors.
This fairly recent norm is pretty pedantic and quite demanding engineering-wise. It specifies some spatial models of the protected space, which (some say) require the engineer / system designer to use specialized software, to be able to model/verify the building and its outside protection system thoroughly, to make sure the building is completely covered. Ever heard of the "rolling ball model", with 20 or 40m diameter, corresponding to different "statistical confidence levels"? In the old norms, it used to be a simple cone, spreading from the collection rod...

An important part of the outside lightning protection system is a good solid ground/earth. I hope I'm not wrong to say that again newly built houses must have a stainless steel grounding stripe (of a specified cross-section, I believe 4x30 mm) buried in the concrete of the foundations (below the watertight insulation) around the whole perimeter of the house - and a certified "electric mains revision engineer" has recently suggested to me to lay a dozen meters of this stripe into the ditch I was digging for my incoming mains service cable. The stripe buried in the wet concrete must have an appropriate number of "attachment terminals" clamped on, corresponding to the number of lightning collector down-conductors coming off the roof. When I was a lad, my father used to tell me that a good earth can be a square meter of a stainless steel sheet, buried deep enough in the ground to stay in wet contact with the earth all year long => noone ever told me that a simple rod rammed into the ground would cut it.

As for inside surge protection: the building and its closest surrounding open space is "compartmented" into so called "lightning protection zones": LPZ 0 for outside, LPZ 1 is the first zone inside the building, LPZ 2 is a "machine room" deeper in the building. And, on any cabling entrances / interfaces between the zones, there shall be surge arrestors of appropriate "damage/energy capacity", nominally called "protection class". Until a few years back, the classes were:
LPZ0 -> LPZ1 = class B lightning current arrestor (at the entrance into the building)
LPZ1 -> LPZ2 = class C surge arrestor (at the entrance into the room)
and there are also class D surge arrestors, inside sensitive equipment.
Nowadays the classes were renamed to "1, 2 and 3", probably to make the matter more confusing

The stratification of surge arrestors into class B, C and D has two aspects:
1) energy of the pulse - typically stated as a peak current in kA, over a predefined wave in time:10/350us for class B, 8/20 us for class C (the two time values being rise time and fall time to half the peak value).
2) response time of the protection device - the finer stages in the cascade should react faster.

And again, the building has an inside protection earth - the green/yellow conductor. For many years now, our mains distribution system (in newly constructed buildings) has a dedicated protection earth, separate from the neutral wire. Apart from other benefits, it allows for deployment of "current-compensated" protection breakers that sense undesired leakage from the live+neutral wires. Back to the point though: the PE and N conductors are only connected together at a single point in the mains service cabinet of the building. And, this inside earth is connected to the aforementioned outside "lightning protection earth", again at a single point - on the sketches, this point is typically painted someplace on the underside of the building The point is: if you get a direct hit from a lightning, the grounding system (outer and inner) should make sure that at least all the protective grounding outside and inside remains bolted together at some common potential - I believe hence the label "equipotential grounding busbar" used often in our mains and protection literature. Combined with a functional outer lightning collection system, this should make sure that noone inside the building gets hit by a voltage spike.

Just a note on the surge arrestors: obviously there are different arrestor gadgets for different purposes, using different protective devices on the inside: there are protection gadgets for the mains line, for telephone lines, twisted-pair Ethernet, for small-signal coaxial cabling, for various industrial purposes (slow analog signals, fieldbusses etc). As for the bare electronic components used: perhaps the most universal component is a "gas-filled static discharge chamber". These can be used up to several GHz as they have very little parasitic capacity - but their opening voltage is at least 90 V, which is failry high for small-signal electronics. I.e. the gas discharge capsule is a fairly coarse protection. For finer protection, there are zeners and especially transils = semiconductor devices, with nominal opening voltages starting from units of Volts. Their major downside is a significant parasitic capacity, making them useless above perhaps 10 MHz - another downside is quite some leakage current well below the opening voltage. For signals below maybe 200 mV, you can even use plain Si or Schottky diodes - again beware of parasitic capacity (matters for RF signals). The beefier semiconductor you choose, the more parasitic capacity. Coaxial transmission lines are nice in that the outside conductor (coax shielding) can often be directly grounded = pretty good protection. Obviously you still have to protect the live conductor with some arrestor device. For relatively narrow-band radio signals (anything modulated on some RF carrier) there is a perfect protection device: the quarter-wavelength shorted stub. For DC (and for lightning), this is effectively a short - but it passes the RF energy at its center frequency as if it wasn't there. It also has a downside: it's incompatible with phantom DC power, often used to power an LNB / downconverter / preamp in the antenna. Thus, for broadband / multi-frequency RF above say 10 MHz, your only option is the gas discharge capsule. Still the coax seems a lot easier to protect than free-floating symmetrical transmission lines, such as Ethernet or the telephone line. The "protection gadgets" on the market, tailor-made for a specific purpose, often contain further devices, apart from the surge arrestor component itself - there can be a combination of several arrestor devices (depending on the arrangement of live signal wires and reference ground, number of pairs), the arrestor devices can be in a cascade, and can also be supplemented by R/L/C components (filter) to improve the protection effect of the gadget. The effectiveness of serial resistance or inductance is only limited by the required passband (again this is a problem with RF). For some signals, galvanic isolation (on the "safer side" after some surge arrestors) can be a good additional measure to increase protection.

An important point: you have to protect *all* the cables/lines entering the protected space (house), otherwise the protection isn't complete. And yes it's impossible to protect signal cabling against a direct lightning strike. Which doesn't mean you should give up entirely.

As far as antennas on the roof are concerned, these should be placed in LPZ 0b (= shaded by the lightning rods), and the new norm demands not only galvanic isolation of the antenna from the outside lightning collector and rods, it further specifies that the isolation should fulfill a so called "safe distance", which is something like 1m of free air. If you have an iron mast for your antennas, that mast should be that well isolated from the collector. The recommended way to do it is not to ground the mast to the lightning collector, and use some plastic supports (1m poles) to mount a tall lightning rod high enough over your antennas. Obviously its downconductor should keep the required distance. See a photo in the references.

Finally, let me offer a couple of links to sketches and further reading. Especially, the nice colourful sketches in the Dehn publications are much more useful than the spartan simple black-and-white sketches in the official norm (the norm deals with measurement/evaluation methods for certification purposes, and the relevant sketches are quite narrowly focused / theoretical).

http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_lhm/conventionalLPT.pdf
http://www.dehn.de/pdf/ds/DS614e.pdf (page 6, zoom in on the sketch)
http://www.mujdum.cz/image-wm.php?rubrika_id=6&link=4dede16b69abf%2Fstavba-hromosvod-blesk-08.jpg
http://www.saseltel.com.my/the-lightning-protection.html
http://www.fccps.cz/img/Meinberg/MBG_sketch_en.png
http://www.prepeti.cz/?q=en/pkopt-n-lambda-24g-bcdf-m-coaxial-surge-protection-brok
http://www.dehn.co.uk/uk/service/downloads/publications_int_ue.shtml
http://www.dehn.de/en/products/lp_zones.shtml#
http://www.scribd.com/doc/50619799/IEC-62305-4-Protection-Against-Lightning

Mag-Amp - would be a Mag-Amp transformer

Here's a big tip about surge "protectors" that everyone should understand. They have a finite "lifetime".
Think of it like a bar of soap. Every time you wash, the soap gets smaller and smaller, until at some point there is no more usable soap.
Surge "protectors" get used up too. How quickly depends on how big the "surge" AND how often it happens. That also applies to "whole house" versions. The only way to tell how much "protection" remains is to test the protector, and the next "hit" may be bigger than the protector can handle. That means a test unit or an electrician = $$$.
The bottom line? If your home takes a big hit, replace the surge protectors.
Here's a bit more detail: http://www.thorschrock.com/2008/05/24/its-time-to-check-your-surge-protector/
(I'm not a salesman or affiliated with this or any other company.)

For all the experiences and attempts to thwart lightning that you find in this forum, the one fact I truly revere is the fact that LIGHTNING KILLS. It kills people without electronics. It kills trees, it has shattered buildings and many things both natural & man-made.

Electronics are fickle by design and fail on their own. We destroy them with the little bits of static electricity we accumulate in our bodies.

If anyone can devise a fail-safe method of deterring this phenomenon, other than a dedicated shunt, there's a fortune awaiting you.

Bottom line is do what you can afford to provide the maximum protection for the value of what you'd like to protect. It will save you some heartache in milder circumstances, but it's the luck of the draw when it comes to a direct or near direct strike. All you can really do is pray that you are around to rebuild and the rebuild is minor.