Can a surge protector be re-engineered to become a line filter?
grazingkow asked:
Can I just switch the AC input with the outputs on a surge protector to make it work in reverse, protecting the house from voltage spikes?
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Can I just switch the AC input with the outputs on a surge protector to make it work in reverse, protecting the house from voltage spikes?
January 11th, 2010 at 4:10 am
I assume your are talking about an outlet strip with built in surge protection. A surge protector is a device (MOV) wired into an appliance or outlet strip or breaker box.
Just plugging the outlet strip in and turning it on, connects it’s internal surge protection to the house’s AC line. But that will provide very little or no real protection, as the inductance of the wiring will prevent it’s internal protection from taking effect until after the surge has done it’s damage in the rest of the house.
To be effective, the protection has to be where the wire enters the house, as that is where the surge first comes into the house. You have to catch it there before it propagates to the rest of the wiring. So if you want to protect the entire house, you have to put the protection MOVs at that point, in the circuit breaker panel. And, the MOVs have to be much larger than the ones in the outlet strip.
. billrussell42
January 11th, 2010 at 6:48 am
Either way it’s connected, a MOV works exactly the same.
If your power lines or the house were hit by lightning (to be extreme), nothing will effectively stop the damage to equipment and circuits, indeed possibly the whole house.
The surge protection provided in computer surge protection devices is only designed to bypass relatively short duration events, like spikes generated by equipment on the line. Technobuff