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And I'm going to double up on this one.Most of the surge suppressors for sale will reduce or stop small surges. But they are about like laying a penny on a railroad track with the hope of stopping a train. I do watch the weather a little to decide for scheduling outdoor activities. When I see a storm moving in that has some lightning I will make it a point to unplug the Tesla, (and leave the wall connector plugged in), because the repair cost of the Tesla is an order of magnitude or 2 more than my old computer, tv, etc. The neighbors have had frequent damage to their electronics, in some cases about everything in the house, but I have only had a couple of LED lamp failures.
Well I like to lie to myself that my Siemens FS140 does something to protect my gearAnd I'm going to double up on this one.
There's this general idea around serious surge protection: First you got the input power feed; then, you have a filter, usually with chokes and possibly capacitors; and then you have your voltage limiting devices, like MOVs or TVS diodes. The filter is jiggered to be low-pass: That is, low frequency stuff (like, say, 50Hz/60Hz) flies on through with no attenutation. But at high frequencies, say, something above a kHz or 20, the filter will have serious attenuation.
The general way this works is as follows: Say one has a nearby lightning strike with 1.5us to 20us rise times. This hits the filter. If all the filter has is inductors (not unusual), this will fly right on through; but, when one hits the MOV, it does its turn-on and low-impedance trick.
We now have a low impedance to ground, neutral, or whatever; and current starts to flow through ye inductor. Inductors hate rapid changes in current, so all the voltage drop is across the inductor. Ta-da! The inductor(s) has/have, effectively, isolated the house from whatever madness is going on with city power. And that's how one keeps all the electronics on the other side of the surge protection from letting the smoke out.
Extra credit can be achieved by:
Weirdly enough, this is precisely what one sees when one buys one of those plug-it-into-the-wall surge protectors that protects one's computer or TV set. If one opens up such a beast, there will be some nifty looking coils of wire, typically wound around some kind of ferritic core.
- placing small, but high voltage capacitors across the MOVs and/or in front of the inductors on city power.
- Placing spark gaps on the city power side of the filter. It won't change rise times too much, but it will shunt a goodly amount of the applied energy to ground.
And this is where things go somewhat off the rails when one talks about a whole-house surge protector. That surge protector box that's plugged into a wall outlet? The wire gauge has to be big enough to handle 15A or so. That's not teensy-tiny wire. That means that, to get the 1uH to 15uH inductance one needs to do the job, the inductor has to be Physically Large. It'll be small enough to fit in the Home Depot special, sure.
But now lets talk about somebody who's got a 200A panel. Um. That's BIG wire. Roughly the same number of turns, but the whole shooting match is not going to fit in a 3"x3"x3" box. Since one needs at least two, and probably three of these inductors. And the MOVs have to be bigger since, well, we're talking more energy anyway.
So: Those cheapie ones from Home Depot are cool, may do something for the occasional surge since the MOVs will be present; but I'd expect that MOVs (which, remember, do have limited lifetimes) would fail after a time. The one you want probably costs at least a couple hundred bucks and requires a real electrician to put it in, probably (not sure about this) after the meter but before the breaker box.
Again: One goes to this kind of extreme when one's a farmer on the flats; or the poster somewhere earlier in this thread whose garage or whatever was situated on a ridge and was subject to some serious lightning energy. Most of us don't need to sweat it.
But I hate the idea of that Home Depot special. My impression is that those look great, but won't do anything for you (except, perhaps, explode) when a real lightning bolt strikes nearby.
(And that last bit: Yes, I've had to personally contend with blown-up gear, smoke, removed parts, and burned-out circuit boards that was due to lightning a few times. Usually it's been due to seriously improper grounding in the field.)
Interesting. I've read the data sheet.Well I like to lie to myself that my Siemens FS140 does something to protect my gear
Interesting for another reason: As I mentioned before, MOVs in general have a limited lifetime, especially if they get hit near their energy levels. When they fail, they can fail open or short. If one fails short, the breaker pops. In which case one's going to have to run down there and notice that the breaker's open.
If one of the MOVs in there fails open, there's still power, so one will get an audible alert.
In the fail-short case, then, it'll be a silent failure. Until one opens up the breaker box and looks.
No way of knowing if it would prevent the loss even if it was a spike. It also could have been an extended low voltage situation.As part of understanding whether I ought to have a surge protector on the fridge, I did some research. $1500 for a new fridge stings, and the answer is I definitely want a surge protector. No it's not a panacea, but it would have prevented this loss.
Going along with this thread... Say a surge hits.No way of knowing if it would prevent the loss even if it was a spike. It also could have been an extended low voltage situation.
I would think by your own insurance. Of course you could sue and possibly get something.how about if you are hooked up with the supercharger and lightning hit, are you covered?
But they also said “normally not covered”. So who knows.Ground lightning strike while Tesla Model S was Supercharging
Update to Model S disabled after close by lightning strike while Supercharging
TMC thread
Bottom line, Tesla engineers had the OPs Tesla Model S for a month and a half, after the lightning incident, while Tesla performed diagnostics and made repairs to an unspecified number of Tesla Model S components. Tesla returned the repaired Model S to the OP once repairs and testing by the Service Center was completed.
Yes.We are are experiencing our third day in a row of severe thunderstorm warnings here in Western North Carolina. While we usually don't have many problems we have had lightning damage of electronics twice in the past 30 years. I have been trying to unplug my MYLR for the storms. When searching the subject I really don't get a definitive answer.
Though Tesla recommends keeping the car plugged in when not driving I left the car unplugged last week to avoid lightning while we were out of town for 6 days. It was charged to 80% when I left and was still showing 80% when I returned so phantom power draw does not seem to be a problem with my vehicle.
While nothing can really withstand a direct lightning strike, I am most concerned with power surges caused by these storms.
Do you unplug your Tesla for these storms?