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Surge protector

This morning we had a power surge.  First one I ever experienced.  It knocked out the sub woofer components of my GoldenEar Triton one speakers. In my ignorance I had them plugged into the wall rather than a surge protector. Soooo it blew the amplifiers in the sub woofers. It’s going to be a costly proposition: $500 for the amplifiers plus God knows how much the dealer is going to charge for coming to my house. (He’s very reluctant to do it, wants me to lug the 80 lbs speakers to the store.   
Meanwhile, I’m having to listen to bass-less  speakers for the foreseeable future.
So, the moral of the story is plug everything into a surge protector.

128x128rvpiano
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squared80's avatar
squared80
114 posts
 

If you don't have a whole house surge protector like the Seimens FS140, you're doing it wrong. Nothing else will do much, but SurgeX is probably the best outlet style protector. 

erik_squires
16,077 posts
 

@squared80 -

For safety and reliability reasons whole house surge suppression units have a clamping voltage around 400V from neutral.  I can tell you from personal experience they don't do great with sensitive electronics. Lets talk specs though:

A 120V circuit goes up and down 60Vrms from the neutral, which has a peak of ~ 85V .

60Vrms = 60V * square_root(2) = 84Vpk

According to actual third party testing here with a 5kV surge the Furman PST-8 let an additional 40 Volts through. Lets do the math:

400Vpk - (84Vpk + 40) = 270V additional volts before clamping starts.

I quote the review here:

It turned a 5,000-volt surge into just 40 volts, thanks in part to a shutdown circuit that turns off all power when it detects a surge. The Furman PST-8 actually let less voltage through in our tests than high-end series-mode surge eliminators that can cost hundreds more.

erik_squires
16,077 posts
 

@ozzy I've had similar experiences with a whole house unit.   The one piece of gear I lost was a laptop (Macbook Air with amazing battery life, so sad) which was the only piece of kit in my home that was not further protected by plug in strips.

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