Wow.... that's a lot coming from you today. You eat chocolate AND coffee today ? :-)
Direct lightning strike, I'm with the original poster, nothing will stop a direct strike. You almost never have a direct strike on your equipment, and the electric grid tries to protect itself from such hits, but isn't designed to protect all the users equipment as much as it is the grid itself. How do I know ? I work for the 'lectric company ! When the blackout occurred in Florida a couple years ago, we saw transient voltages and frequencies as far north as New England, far beyond the actual blackout area. All that happened in Florida that day was an engineer defeated protective systems on a switch, and when a fault occurred in the substation, the systems that were designed to protect it couldn't, and then other backup systems had to, but operate slower, which allowed the problem to propagate farther out rather than be contained. Slower is a relative term, which may mean 1/4 or 1/2 second, normally protection systems operate within a few cycles, meaning 1/20th of a second or so. Lightning strikes are protected by, of all things, lightning arrestors, which are a straight path to ground when the voltage on the line goes up beyond the normal range. It goes from being a high resistance to almost no resistance reacting directly to the voltage spike itself. Also, over the high voltage power lines are what they call "static wires" which among other things, tries to intercept the lightning strikes, keeping it from hitting the power wires directly. At the distribution level, I don't know what they have there, but I'd expect similar equipment, but since the voltage has to go up for the device to operate, you will see spikes, no matter how well they work. A direct hit to the circuit you're on will likely send some big voltage swings into your house, which may or may not upset equipment. My folks had a lightning strike on a palm tree outside the house, it followed the tree down, jumped to the sprinkler wires, into the house, onto the telephone system, and fried a TV set, the TiVo modem on their S1 box, and a few other things. The most spectacular part of it besides the burned up tree, scattered stones, and the very skittish cat was one power transformer which was plugged into an outlet exploded, sending plastic fragments around the room, embedding in boxes 20' away with significant force. See, there was even Tivo content in the message :-) For what it's worth, I know my company offers whole house protection, not in terms of UPS, but for voltage spikes, which while a little expensive, protects everything in the house, and is generally quality equipment. If you really want to protect everything, that's not a bad way to go. Glen ----- Original Message ----- From: "MegaZone" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, September 27, 2008 8:53 PM Subject: Re: [TiVo Central] Re: Surge Protectors > Once upon a time m_jessing shaped the electrons to say... >> Two things to keep in mind - UPS' are for computers, surge suppressors >> are for TV's etc. UPS systems are designed for computers so in the > > That's not really true......
