Dear Mijo, In my original post on your disdain for fuses, I acknowledged that the little fuse screwed into the back of your equipment indeed cannot prevent damage due to a lightning strike. However, lightning strikes are rare as..... getting struck by lightning. There are innumerable equipment glitches that can kill you, take out a power transformer, destroy your circuitry without killing you, that fuses DO protect us from. Your knowledge of electronics is sketchy. DC voltage is the least of your worries with a transformer. For example, in any conventional power supply, capacitors are used as filters to remove AC ripple from the DC output of the supply. Each of these filter capacitors is connected between the DC voltage rail and ground. If one of those capacitors fails such that it shorts the path to ground, then the transformer sees a sudden huge current demand. (Due in part to the fact that there is suddenly zero or very much lower than normal resistance between the high voltage rail and ground, which means the transformer is asked to pass infinite current momentarily. In that case, the little fuse acts much faster than the circuit breaker. This is Ohm's Law in action.) Your realization that that has occurred might only be smoke rising from your kaput power transformer. Or worse yet, those capacitors may put voltage and current on the chassis, such that when you touch a conductive knob, you receive a possibly deadly shock. (In an unrelated episode, I once saw a woman die when she touched a metal control on a frozen yogurt machine, due to cardiac arrest. This was in the NIH cafeteria, yet.) Stuff can also catch fire. Similar phenomena can occur if a solid state device or tube fails such that there is a hot to ground short within its body. Fuses are there for a reason, and where there is a fuse, it should be rated for the current recommended and left in place. Knock yourself out with boutique fuses, if you like, but do use fuses.
