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Protecting your investment Our society has become increasingly safety conscious. The use of seat belts in automobiles has been demonstrated to save many lives. In fact, seat belts have been shown to he so effective that many states have passed mandatory seat belt lanes. The same is true of smoke detectors in the home. At first , just a few pioneering individuals were installing them. Then, as a result of the number of lives saved because of the beep of a smoke detector, more and more people saw the wisdom of having an alarm to alert them in the event of a fire. This consciousness of safety has been carried over into other areas. Modern electronics products have become so sensitive to a number of environmental factors that efforts to eliminate, or at lease minimize, damage caused by these factors has increased. Two examples of these damaging factors are electrostatic discharge (ESD) damage and damage caused by power-line disturbances such as surges and spikes. The electronics community, along with materials and packaging. manufacturers, has come up with a number of answers to these problems. For example. the ESD problem has been attacked on a number of fronts: wrist straps, conductive bench tops, portable conductive work surfaces and other products alleviate the problem. Likewise, manufacturers have come up with a number of ways to deal with the problem of power-line disturbances. These range from simple plug-in devices that feature minimal protection from spikes and surges, all the wary up to uninterruptible power supplies that not only provide attenuation or elimination of spikes, but will provide from a few minutes to several hours of battery power in the event of a power outage. All of this protection comes, of course, at a price. First, it costs money. Sometimes a lot of' money. In some cases p open use of the protection is inconvenient. Who wants to be tied to a workbench by a length of conductor? What field technician wants to have to unwrap and layout and find a around for a complete ESD protective package? But if you want that protection. you have to use it every time. But wait, there's a worse problem. Some of the products that are supposed to provide protection don't. Or at least they have never been tested to prove that they provide the protection they are claimed to have. As was pointed out in the static protection article in the October issue of ES&T, some of the so-called static protective bags are least effective when protection is needed most. And when it comes to protection from power-line disturbances, it's definitely "Let the buyer beware." For example, in talking to a source for this month's article on power conditioning, I learned that some manufacturer's sell "power conditioning" equipment that doesn't necessarily offer that protection. A little personal investigation with minimal effort confirmed this. I simply went into the personal computer department (d' a local discount store and lifted the first self-proclaimed spike suppressor off the rack. It was not only called a spike suppressor, it was UL listed. However, after I opened the package and took a look at the disclaimer on the hack of the unit, I found that the product had never been tested as a spike suppressor. The UL listing attested to the product’s safety as all electrical wiring device, but said nothing about its ability to protect a device plugged into it front damage caused by powerline disturbances. The manufacturer's packaging was misleading at hest. I'm sure that lots of people have their computers, VCRs and TV's plugged into similar devices, content that they have provided adequate protection for them. Someone once said. "It's not what you don't know that will hurt you. It's what you know for sure that isn't so." Likewise, it's not so much the unprotected electronics products you own that will suffer damage-you can just unplug them during an electrical storm. It's the equipment you have "protected" using inadequate protection that will most likely be damaged or destroyed. Don't leave protection of' electronics equipment to chance. Study the market. Make sure that the protection you provide has been tested and found to be effective. Also see: Feedback |
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