Recovery of electronics from a power failure--need help fast

Appliance power should disconnect simply so you know your protector (no matter how good, how “whole house”, how above the standards) has failed/degraded/reached its end of life (which, you agree, is possible for all protectors). I don’t see why you’re bringing protector size into this. My only question is this: after your protector has stopped working (again, possible with all protectors), would you prefer it:
a) continue to supply power and have no outward indication
b) stop supplying power or have an indicator light go out so you know something is wrong?

Your event - computer’s internal protection worked as it should.

All electronics contain protection. Your concern is a rare transient that occurs maybe once even seven years. That can overwhelm protection in any or all appliances. That hunts for earth destructively via appliances. That rare transient means energy must be earthed outside the building. If that transient is permitted inside, then nothing will protect from a destructive hunt for earth. Nothing.

No protector does protection. Not one. Effective protectors connect energy harmlessly and short (ie ‘less than 10 feet’) to earth. Protection is always about where energy dissipates.

This market is ripe for scams. My father, who wrote advertising, loved how so many all but want to be scammed. His complaint. Government kept trying to make them tell the truth. It took all the fun out of advertising. Eliminate the advertising and no protector adjacent to a computer does any effective protection. View the spec numbers for her expensive protector. No protection claims exist. Where is a wire that connects short (ie ‘less than 10 feet’) to earth?

More responsible companies provide effective solutions including Intermatic, General Electric, Leviton, ABB, Square D, and Siemens. A Cutler-Hammer solution sells in Lowes and Home Depot for less than $50. Each is rated for at least 50,000 amps to make all destructive transients (including lightning) irrelevant. So that protector failure is not even a consideration. So that protection inside household appliances is not overwhelmed. Even her expensive protector needs to be protected.

Your computers protected themselves. Anything adjacent to a computer can only do what is already done better inside. Or sometimes make damage easier. Better protection is always about where energy dissipates - the always required short connection to earth. In any facility that can never have damage, a ‘whole house’ protector is always earthed. A protector is only as effective as its earth ground.

They mostly seem to be discussing how they think surge protectors should work, not how they actually work, which probably isn’t of interest to someone without a lot of technical knowledge.

The important points from your point of view are probably this:

There are different levels of surge protection. Power strips will protect you from surges, but not other types of faults. A UPS will give you better isolation from the electrical line and will protect you from brownouts and flickering power, which a surge protector will not protect you from.

A whole house surge protector offers better protection than power strips. Westom has stated before in other threads that a properly grounded whole house surge protector will stop even a direct lightning strike, and he makes that claim again here, but it’s just not true. Whole house surge protectors are rated for thousands of joules. Your typical Joe Average lightning bolt contains a few billion joules. There simply isn’t anything available for typical home use that will stop a direct lightning strike. Westom’s claim that a whole house surge protectors being better because they shunt the surge to ground right at the entry point of your house is good point, though. It should also be noted that most surges and spikes will not be the result of a direct lightning strike. If lightning strikes a neighbourhood, one unlucky house gets a direct strike and a few hundred houses get an indirect surge.

One thing that hasn’t been discussed much yet is money. A good whole house surge suppressor will cost a few hundred bucks and will require an electrician to install. A fair amount of the cost of a UPS is in the batteries, and if you are just looking for protection against brownouts and flickering power, you don’t necessarily need hours of battery operating time. The cheaper UPS systems don’t have protection in them though, so you need to really look at the specs for what you are buying.

Brownouts and blackouts do not cause electronics damage. Brownouts are harmful only to motorized appliances. Voltage can drop so low that incandescent bulbs dim to 50% intensity. That is ideal power to all electronics. If voltage goes lower, electronics simply do a normal powers off.

A UPS to protect from destructive brownouts or flickering is a very popular urban myth. Protection required even by international design standards make those irrelevant. As demonstrated by both OP’s computers.

What faults are harmful to appliances? Lightning is a classic and most frequent example. Protection from lightning means protection from all other types of transients. A solution that costs less money even protects from direct lightning strikes.

What must always be asked? Where does energy dissipate? Power strip protectors were recommended without even discussing energy. Earth ground was also avoided. Discussing either would harm what really matters - its profit margin. Power strips avoid both topics.

Where are manufacture specifications. Not provided because numbers do not exist. Subjective claims ignore or invent numbers. Hundreds of joules inside a power strip will absorb destructive transients - hundreds of thousands of joules? A damning question. Where are those manufacturer spec numbers? Not posted because those numbers do not exist. And because the recommendation is only subjective.

Effective solutions discuss current - in numbers. An average lightning strike is 20,000 amps. So effective ‘whole house’ protectors start at 50,000 amps. My friend also knows someone who does this stuff. He only had one properly earthed ‘whole house’ protector when a 33,000 volt wire dropped on local distribution. Hundreds of electric meter exploded up to 30 feet from their pans. He suffered no damage except to his meter. Since a properly earthed ‘whole house’ protector protects from direct lightning strikes, then energy from a 33,000 volts fault also dissipated harmlessly.

To make protection better, telcos (that suffer about 100 surges with each thunderstorm) also want protectors located up to 50 meters distant from electronics. Separation is essential to protection. Just another reason why power strips do no effective protection and can make appliance damage easier. To be effective, every protector is distant from the appliance and as close to earth as practicable.

Money. An effective ‘whole house’ protector sold in Lowes or Home Depot is less than $50. Not many hundreds. About $1 per protected appliance. If power strip protectors are implemented, then spend $1000 or $7000 to protect everything. Using products that do not even claim that protection. Most money spent for a power strip goes into profits (and advertising) - not into protection.

OP’s computers demonstrated how robust appliances are. Any protection that works at the appliance is already inside that appliance. Often converting that surge energy into power to helps power the appliance. Every homeowner’s concern is a destructive transient that can overwhelm that protection. Only earthing (ie via a ‘whole house’ protector) provide that protection. Specification numbers define that protection. Solutions recommended without spec numbers are best called scams with obscene profit margins (therefore Monster also sells them).

Protection is always (no exceptions) about where energy dissipates. A protector is only as effective as its earth ground. Effective solutions cost tens or 100 times less money. Then future transients cannot overwhelm existing protection in the OP’s computers. Or destroy that expensive power strip. Even power strip protectors need ‘whole house’ protection. Otherwise house fires can occur (as previously documented).

This is flat out wrong.

Hard drives in computers may slow down, which is a major problem for drives that rely on an air cushion between the head and the platter. With reduced platter rotation, the head can scrape the surface of the platter and cause permanent damage and irrecoverable data loss.

Regulating power supplies will often stop regulating properly. In multiple voltage circuits, you can end up with what is supposed to be a higher level voltage dropping below the level of a lower level voltage, causing unexpected reverse current flow which can damage components. Even in single voltage circuits, erratic voltages can cause indeterminate logical states which can unintentionally switch on multiple circuit paths. You could have an H-bridge motor circuit switch both the top and bottom legs on simultaneously, effectively causing a short circuit between the power supply rails which will fry the H-bridge circuitry.

Cooling fans may not run, causing the components that they keep cool to overheat and be damaged.

I could list many other examples.

Brownouts and erratically switching blackouts can be extremely dangerous to modern electronics. In addition to surges, one of your most common failures is when some sort of transient triggers a protective device on a power line. This could be a lightning bolt, or it could be something like wind just blowing one line into another and shorting them together, or blowing a tree onto a line. Automatic reclosers on the power line will immediately switch the power back on one or two times fairly quickly, then once again after a longer delay (typically 2 minutes, but they are programmable so the actual interval is up to the power company that installs them). Surge suppressors do not protect you at all from these since there is no overvoltage surge or spike present.

Telcos use much more elaborate grounding systems that include things like ring grounds, halo grounds, Faraday cages, and other equipment that is a bit out of the price range of a typical home user. Most people also don’t want to sit inside of a copper cage while they surf the web.

If you want to trust your home to a $50 cheapie whole house protector, go ahead. Personally, I’ll spring the extra couple hundred bucks and get something a bit better.

I looked up that $50 cheapie (it was actually a $61 cheapie) at Lowes and they only listed the amp rating, which is not a good way to evaluate these. No big surprise, but when I tracked down the manufacturer spec it turns out these things are only rated for 400 joules, which isn’t much more than your typical power strip type of surge protector. A good one will be rated for several thousand joules.

And if you think that one of these will protect you from a direct lightning strike then you are seriously deluding yourself.

Tell a hardware designer (who designed computers before the PC existed) that he does not know what he is talking about? Please stop insulting me with fiction.

A majority will make recommendations only from hearsay. His first two paragraphs expose a post without any computer hardware or electrical knowledge. He says DC voltages decrease when AC voltage decreases – an obvious fabrication. He did not even read Intel’s ATX standards that expose that fiction.

Every power supply must provide rock solid DC voltages regardless of AC voltage variation. Some electronics define zero DC voltage variations when AC voltages vary from 85 to 265 volts. Even written on a label adjacent to its power cord. Anyone can read numbers before posting. But some know by ignoring all numbers.

When does hardware (ie a disk drive) first learn that power has been disconnected? When DC voltages drop significantly, then a disk drive prepares for power off - without damage. As was true even with 5 Mb 1960s drives.

“With reduced platter rotation, the head can scrape the surface”? Total nonsense. If its platter spins at a wrong speed, head did not load or were withdrawn. He does not even know how disk drives work. But posted anyway?

Engineers test new designs with AC voltages so low that incandescent bulbs dim to less than 50% intensity. If a design fails at that low voltage, then the design is defective. Gets fixed. Meanwhile, no damage results as even required by a 1970 international design standard. Suddenly hearsay says we were damaging electronics decades ago? Nonsense.

“I saw something fail. That proves xxx caused the failure.” Classic junk science. Knowledge from wild speculation. A violation of what was taught even in junior high school science. That wild speculation is insufficient even for a hypothesis. But ‘proves’ voltage variations are destructive.

Take a $4 power strip. Add some ten cent protector parts. Sell it for $7 in a grocery store. Or sell that protector circuit for $25 or $150 under a Belkin or Monster label. Better quality because it costs more money? Yes, among myth purveyors. No when one first learns spec numbers. A $50 ‘whole house’ protector means effective protection. Most money goes into protection. A $150 Monster protector is only about profits. And near zero protection as numbers say in its specs. Monster has a long history of selling scams to ‘experts’ who forget to first learn how things work. Did you know speaker wire has polarity? Monster even sold that scam.

The engineer makes recommendations by citing manufacturer spec numbers and a few generations of experience. The engineer is also insulted by subjective posts that make fictional accusations and that do not quote even one manufacturer spec number.

OP is encouraged to spend much less money for actual hardware protection. Only one ‘whole house’ protector with upgraded earthing. Why do telcos suffer no damage from 100 surges with each thunderstorm? “Telcos use … elaborate grounding systems”. Because earthing (not a protector) does the protection. Protection also means no protector adjacent to electronics. OP can do same. Superior solution is a 50,000 amp product even sold in Lowes and Home Depot for less than $50 (not for $hundreds). A superior solution also costs less money and is made by a better respected company. Also how it was done over 100 years ago.

OP can apply to his power company for reimbursement. May make a stronger case by inspecting the utility installed primary protection system that only the engineer could define. OP can avert future damage by upgrading earthing to one ‘whole house’ protector.

I have a BS in electrical engineering, over 23 years of experience, and I am currently employed as a lead engineer in a company that makes industrial control systems. In other words, I design industrial controls and rugged industrial computers for a living. I have extensive experience in power and grounding, as well as hardware and software design. You should choose whose technical knowledge you insult a bit more carefully next time.

You will make a bit less of a fool out of yourself if you spend less time assuming that everyone else is an idiot and more time carefully reading what I’ve said and perhaps do a bit of reading up on the subjects involved.

Then you read numbers on each power label before posting. The purpose of a power supply: to create rock solid DC voltages even when AC varies as much as 85 to 265 volts. If an engineer, you knew AC voltage variations do not cause disk drive failure or any other electronics damage. Even a power controller inside every PC will not let its CPU execute when voltages are anything but rock solid stable.

Your first two paragraphs identified, without doubt, insufficient hardware knowledge. Somehow an EE for 23 years. But does not know what a power supply does … as even defined in Intel’s ATX Standards?

Neither power strip nor UPS claim protection. As demonstrated in posts devoid of any manufacturer numeric specifications. No numbers for one simple reason. Even the manufacturer does not claim that protection.

OP can learn the difference between an engineer who includes technical numbers with every post - the always required reasons why. Verses claims made only with subjective reasoning. And accusations (also without numbers) so technically erroneous as to only be wild speculation.

OP can further protect both computers with one properly earthed ‘whole house’ protector from a list of responsible companies. And can protect her expensive power strip from a potential fire as demonstrated previously in these pictures.

What is your education and experience, westom? You are very quick to insult mine while providing nothing of your own.

Sorry for hijacking your thread. I was just saying that was a feature of your surge protector, so you know if it’s stopped working, and know to replace it.

That’s OK, I was done using it anyhow. :slight_smile: Carry on.