Line conditioner protects against momentary brownouts?

[John Doe]

A line conditioner that includes a voltage regulator seems to have
done wonders for my computer system (recently replaced my old
model with a better model), especially when my house power was not
very good. Still, when an air conditioner comes on, the voltage
momentarily drops enough to cause the line conditioner to click on
and off quickly. Mainly out of curiosity, how well does it
regulate the voltage during that very brief voltage drop? I would
think that there would be voltage spikes when the relay opens and
closes, but maybe those spikes are extremely short?

Just in case anyone has links to a chart showing the output action
of a house voltage regulator during a momentary voltage drop, that
would be cool. I realize that is not likely.

Thanks.

 

[PeterD]

A line conditioner that includes a voltage regulator seems to have
done wonders for my computer system (recently replaced my old
model with a better model), especially when my house power was not
very good. Still, when an air conditioner comes on, the voltage
momentarily drops enough to cause the line conditioner to click on
and off quickly. Mainly out of curiosity, how well does it
regulate the voltage during that very brief voltage drop? I would
think that there would be voltage spikes when the relay opens and
closes, but maybe those spikes are extremely short?

Just in case anyone has links to a chart showing the output action
of a house voltage regulator during a momentary voltage drop, that
would be cool. I realize that is not likely.

Thanks.

If you are worried about the transition, get a system that runs on
inverter 100% of the time... These systems produce no transiet
conditions or changeovers--they simply stop charging the battery when
line voltage is bad. Keep in mind they are more expensive, big and
heavy!

(nice thing is that they can correct for a couple of things such as
bad frequency regulation (usually from backup generators) but keep
running since the charger can handle wrong frequencies. They simply
continue to output a rock-sold 60 hz voltage.

 

[Nico Coesel]

If you are worried about the transition, get a system that runs on
inverter 100% of the time... These systems produce no transiet
conditions or changeovers--they simply stop charging the battery when
line voltage is bad. Keep in mind they are more expensive, big and
heavy!

I disagree. An UPS which ac-dc dc-ac conversion is more prone to
failures than an UPS which just sits still and only delivers power
when it is really necessary. The PSU in equipment should be able to
deal with skipping a few mains cycles anyway so there is plenty of
time to switch to battery power.

 

[John Doe]

I disagree. An UPS which ac-dc dc-ac conversion is more prone to
failures than an UPS which just sits still and only delivers
power when it is really necessary.

FWIW.

I was talking about a 1200 watt line conditioner (that includes a
voltage regulator), not an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS).
There is no battery.

I have no use for a UPS. And I believe most UPS users are wasting
their money. If you have blackouts frequently enough to lose
important data, you have too many blackouts. But seriously, the
average user risk of Windows crashing, freezing or spontaneously
rebooting, is probably much greater than a blackout. And when
Windows crashes, a UPS does not help. Windows has taught me to
never leave data unsaved for more than a few minutes.

Of course I am not talking about a company with critical data
and/or data that must be continuously accessed, or something else
like that.

The PSU in equipment should be able to deal with skipping a few
mains cycles anyway so there is plenty of time to switch to
battery power.

Spontaneous rebooting of Windows went from annoying to zero here
after starting to use a cheap voltage regulator, for years. Too
bad I did not try one back in the Windows 95/98 days to see if
maybe it would have helped. The horrible memory management was
known to cause crashing, but maybe a voltage regulator would have
helped.

Now brownouts are the only risk here, prolonged under or
overvoltage is no longer a problem, so it operates only
momentarily and I wonder whether that does good. I definitely like
the visual indication that the house voltage is correct, but that
could be done more easily.

Anyway, as always, I enjoy the discussion.

 

[John Doe]

it operates only momentarily and I wonder whether that does

good.

Besides a good PC power supply or better wiring, what retail
product best corrects momentary lags in voltage like those caused
by starting an air conditioner? Is there something better than a
device like these?

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=line+conditioner&x=0&y=0

I wonder about the products made for home theaters, since
apparently they do not include anything for momentary low
voltages?

 

[Cydrome Leader]

One company has the best of both, but still big heavy and expensive.

A ferroresonant transformer that will keep the power up long enough
for the inverter to make a seamless switch, and long enough to stop
instantaneous dropouts and noise from ever appearing on the output.

I forget who makes them, but we had a few at work and they were very
effective at stopping all manner of line noise and problems.

It was possible Best, and I think they finally dropped those things.

they were very inefficient and really really likely to fail/shutdown if
you tried to use them with a generator.

 

[Nico Coesel]

FWIW.

I was talking about a 1200 watt line conditioner (that includes a
voltage regulator), not an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS).
There is no battery.

I have no use for a UPS. And I believe most UPS users are wasting
their money. If you have blackouts frequently enough to lose

I agree. I used to have an UPS (actually several) for years but it
turned out the UPS was causing more problems than it solved.

 

[Nobody]

I have no use for a UPS. And I believe most UPS users are wasting
their money. If you have blackouts frequently enough to lose
important data, you have too many blackouts. But seriously, the
average user risk of Windows crashing, freezing or spontaneously
rebooting, is probably much greater than a blackout. And when
Windows crashes, a UPS does not help. Windows has taught me to
never leave data unsaved for more than a few minutes.

Living out in the sticks, I tend to get blackouts lasting a couple of
seconds every time there's a thunderstorm. Without a UPS, the PCs would
effectively be unusable for half the night (there's no point using it if
it's going to reboot at any moment).

FWIW, I find WinXP to be quite stable, with most reboots being down to
driver upgrades. But I do tend to avoid running anything which isn't
necessary; it's likely to be worse if you have kids loading the system up
with junk.

Spontaneous rebooting of Windows went from annoying to zero here
after starting to use a cheap voltage regulator, for years. Too
bad I did not try one back in the Windows 95/98 days to see if
maybe it would have helped. The horrible memory management was
known to cause crashing, but maybe a voltage regulator would have
helped.

For me, Win95/98/ME would crash several times a day due to memory issues.
You would have to have truly awful mains to add significantly to that.
OTOH, I was using it for software development, which probably affected the
crash rate somewhat.

 

[John Doe]

Living out in the sticks, I tend to get blackouts lasting a
couple of seconds every time there's a thunderstorm. Without a
UPS, the PCs would effectively be unusable for half the night
(there's no point using it if it's going to reboot at any
moment).

Right... If you live in the sticks, have frequent thunderstorms
that cause blackouts, and do not disconnect stuff to help avoid
your hardware being fried by lightning strikes, you can use a UPS.

Or, if you are a company with critical data and/or data that must
be continuously accessed, or something else like that.

There are lots of possible exceptions, but the point is that many
ordinary PC users who think that they need a UPS probably do not.
You can see the ignorance in product reviews. Many UPS end users
are probably just infatuated by the idea of running their PC on
battery power for a while.

For me, Win95/98/ME would crash several times a day due to
memory issues. You would have to have truly awful mains to add
significantly to that. OTOH, I was using it for software
development, which probably affected the crash rate somewhat.

Yep, lots of reasonable theory there, I just wish I had the
proof.
--

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From: Nobody <nobody nowhere.com>
Subject: Re: Line conditioner protects against momentary brownouts?
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2010 11:59:10 +0100
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[Cydrome Leader]

Totally inefficient - but the company I worked for walled-in whole
banks of fluorescent lights and left them turned on and connected.
Green was something for hippies and weirdos and global warming a hoax.

We did have a large diesel ~100 KW and didn't have problems with the
power transfer glitches dropping the UPS off line.

that's a fairly large generator, and probably would not slow down enough
when you throw a ferroresonant transformer on it to cause the transformer
to act goofy or lose its field and then try the batteries, then notice
the generator is upto speed- repeat until the batteries are dead.

It's interesting that they'll tolerate any garbage waveform input, but the
frequency must be nearly perfect or they just don't work.

 

[Cydrome Leader]

Right... If you live in the sticks, have frequent thunderstorms
that cause blackouts, and do not disconnect stuff to help avoid
your hardware being fried by lightning strikes, you can use a UPS.

Or, if you are a company with critical data and/or data that must
be continuously accessed, or something else like that.

There are lots of possible exceptions, but the point is that many
ordinary PC users who think that they need a UPS probably do not.
You can see the ignorance in product reviews. Many UPS end users
are probably just infatuated by the idea of running their PC on
battery power for a while.

I was like that for a while, but mostly to try to rig up some extended run
time on ~650VA UPS by attaching it to a larger set of external batteries
to try to get a somewhat meaningful runtime out of it all.

I forgot about one part- junior UPSes are not designed with proper cooling
to run longer than their batteries will last which is usually minutes.

So I was "testing" my UPS to see how long it could run all my junk and
there was a giant bang and cloud of smoke as the UPS overheated and
exploded all the power transistor or SCRs or whatever it was made with.
Whoops.