Power conditioner types


Do any power conditioners actually store the energy from the outlet/power company and then generate it on demand or do they all filter the current as it is coming through?

Or is it more complicated than that?

If any do store it, are they a different class?
sokogear
Technically, an awful lot of them store it. Decware is one of the few actually to show you what is in the box. Check it out: https://www.decware.com/newsite/ZLC.html

Now if you can read a schematic- or text, or you could for that matter look at the picture- you will notice they use a capacitor. Caps store energy, that is what they all do, and so technically the answer to your question is yes.

A lot of them do this by the way. Nobody thinks of it that way, a whole slew are ready to leap and argue, but facts are facts and it is simply a fact caps store power.

It is of course a little more complicated than that. Capacitors have values, the unit of capacitance being the Henry. Most of our caps are measured in mH, milli-Henry’s, because it is a hard way to store energy.

The caps typically used are very small value. What they do is allow the powerful (high amplitude) 60Hz AC energy to pass. But look close, magnify that wave, you will see riding on it a lot of very low amplitude noise. The filter cap can do nothing with the 120V power. But the microscopically tiny way below a millivolt noise? The filter cap charges and discharges constantly, and that is how it filters out this noise.

We can do the same with larger value caps. It is just that they become both very costly, and very dangerous. I have had a couple in my system. Scared the crap out of me! I was afraid to touch it. Good thing too, the guy who brought it over got a little too close to the rack, giant spark of lightning arc zapped, scared the crap out of him! But oh, the bass once that thing was hooked up!

The Decware strikes me as a deal. It is nice to try and learn this stuff but it is even better to have a bitchin system. Just get one.
@millercarbon - I have one - a Furman elite 15i, which is a little above entry level and was thinking about upgrading to one that did more than filter. When I originally got it, it was for functionality of having a large number of outlets and protection against power spikes, but I found it improved the sound a little.

For a very cosmetic reason (other boxes are silver, Furman is dark brown) I am considering a change. I like the fact that the Furman shuts off when it senses a problem and has a switch on the front, that I haven't seen on some.

There are so many out there, it is really unbeleivable.

PS Audio's line is famous for doing just that.  PerfectPower was somewhere in between, storing enough energy to correct the waveform without necessarily being able to recreate missing waves.

I wrote quite a bit here:

https://inatinear.blogspot.com/2019/04/power-management-for-frugal-audiophiles.html