Powervent H2O heater surge protection

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jensent

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Apr 22, 2010
158
central Ill
The electronics on our powervent gas water heater take a hit when t-storms are in the county on occasion. This happens two or three times a year. The burner goes into a lock-out phase and gives a phoney reason like flammable gases present. The MFG tech. support has taught me to "reboot" the unit and most times all is well. The heater is back into service and we forget about it. Every couple of years the damage is such that it must be rebooted after each run cycle. The MFG ships me the required part and I repair it. The surge protestor the we have been using needs replacing. It is shot. It was a one inch cube the plugged in directly ahead of the heater. Markings on the side are thus: Model no.AB-2 maxload 15A 125vac 60HZ TVSS rating 330V . It also is marked L-NL-GN-G. Can anyone tell me what properties a plug type surge protecter should have to protect this water heater? With me skills and budget the simpler and cheaper the better.
Thanks
Tom
 
Get a whole house arrestor, and be done with it. protects in lightning strikes, rolling black/brown outs, and "cleans up" the powerflo coming into the house. not cheap, but neither is 3 or 4 flatscreens, two plus computors, washer/dryer, ceiling fans, and all other appliances that are pluged in at the time of the strke!
 
PINEBURNER said:
Get a whole house arrestor, and be done with it. protects in lightning strikes, rolling black/brown outs, and "cleans up" the powerflo coming into the house.
Clamping surges and spikes it can do but it will do nothing for rolling back/brown outs.
 
LLigetfa said:
PINEBURNER said:
Get a whole house arrestor, and be done with it. protects in lightning strikes, rolling black/brown outs, and "cleans up" the powerflo coming into the house.
Clamping surges and spikes it can do but it will do nothing for rolling back/brown outs.
guess I was refering more to the "surge" wich comes along with the black/brown outs.
 
I spec in lots of surge protection for my job and these guys make GREAT stuff.

http://www.surgepack.com/

Prices should be around $1000.00 (installed) for the whole home power surge/filter. You can get a 15 amp single circuit for around $200.00 installed.

I would take a hard look at them.
 
The Ditek D75 is what I would spec for the average home. Last time I priced one out it was $325 CDN.

http://www.ditekcorp.com/product-details.asp?ProdKey=1

D75.jpg
 
Siemens makes (or when I bought one, did- and I assume they still make it ) a whole house surge suppressor that's actually built into a pair of 20 amp circuit breakers- you merely substitute it for two breakers in your existing panel, without losing space for any breakers.

As others have mentioned, surge suppression merely catches big spikes of overvoltage, not necessarily other weird electric events. A computer-back up supply might actually go a lot further at that, and you'd be surprised how often you can find them serving as doorstops in offices- sometimes all they need is a a fresh set of internal batteries, which are usually easy to replace.
 
If the protection is based on MOVs (Metal-Oxide Varistor) it has a limited lifetime and gets 'used up' by the surges but you can't really gauge it's condition. Most power strip surge protectors are MOV based and should be replaced every couple of years (more often with dirty power). Any unit that installs across the power lines is an absorbing type and therfore sacrificial.

You want a filter that wires in series with the branch circuit, there are not cheap but the power vented water heaters are pretty pricy also.

An example of the TYPE of protection you should be using for expensive electronics:
http://www.zerosurge.com/twooutletmodels.cfm

Any electronics that freaks out on a brown out is poorly designed - a water heater that freaks should be a class action.


Aaron
 
Aaron Pasteris said:
If the protection is based on MOVs (Metal-Oxide Varistor) it has a limited lifetime and gets 'used up' by the surges but you can't really gauge it's condition. Most power strip surge protectors are MOV based and should be replaced every couple of years (more often with dirty power). Any unit that installs across the power lines is an absorbing type and therfore sacrificial.

You want a filter that wires in series with the branch circuit, there are not cheap but the power vented water heaters are pretty pricy also.

An example of the TYPE of protection you should be using for expensive electronics:
http://www.zerosurge.com/twooutletmodels.cfm

Any electronics that freaks out on a brown out is poorly designed - a water heater that freaks should be a class action.


Aaron

agreed- although you may also be able to get a whole-house surge protector that can be installed by your utility at the meter socket and that won't get used up by spikes simply because it is so robust.

In the "anything worth doing is worth overdoing" mode, I have one of these wired in at my main breaker panel

http://www.iceradioproducts.com/impulse2.html#6

tied to 2 nearby 8 foot ground rods spaced 20 feet apart, also tied in parallel with large cable to 80 feet of buried underground copper cable installed about 8 feet below ground in the trench for my cellar drain

plus a pair of the Siemens arrestor/ breakers in the panel itself that have indicator lights that will go out when their MOV's have had their fill of surges and cannot do anything any more, and

any and all sensitive electronics then have their own individual good-quality surge suppressors right between the cord and the wall receptacle

The idea is that the ones at the panel will absorb transients that come in on the power line, while the units at the end-use devices will be a 'second line of defense' for those outside transients, and an additional line of defense for transients that may actually be generated within the house by other devices (which may, depending on vagaries of wiring impedances inside of buildings, may not be fully attenuated by suppressors at the main panel).

Does anyone normally _need_ to go to those lengths for a residential application? No- but since my house needed a total re-wiring anyways, and I had a lot of these items on hand from past projects, it involved little extra work or cost to really drive a stake through it-- and the results are a nice change from the way my house was when I bought it, where I had transients galore and stray voltage all over the place from some past person's seemingly-beer-influenced concepts of how to wire and what supposedly sufficed for grounding methods...
 
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