Advice pls, Household Surge protection

[Megageth]

Hi all,

Need some advice pls/asb.
Problem: Whilst we have a generator in DRC, the running costs are high and there is a local electricity supply from the city. The city power is very badly regulated though and there are frequent voltage drops/spikes, normally for a few seconds.

Solution: What I would like is some kind of regulator that I can install where the city power meets the house. It will provide surge protection and redundancy for the dips. We have got several small voltage regulators plugged in between the wall sockets and appliances but these are not a good long term, whole wheat solution.

Anyone have any knowledge or experience of what I should be looking to install?

FYI, what we run in the house are:
5 aircons
1 x fridge
1 x stove
1 x microwave
5 x laptops
2 x geysers

- basically large household consumption.

[Skouperd]

Geth, my first thinking was UPS but that is not what you want as the cost associated with buying a UPS that can deal with that kind of issues will be astronomical. Out of interest, how much amps do you draw from the main grid, and I assume you are running 220V? Any event, have a look at www.APC.com they supply high quality surge protectors, and UPS. I use a APC UPS on my servers and they are really awesome, but you may just be interested in something like the "Surge protection" or "power conditioning".

[Thor_23]

Hey Geth,

we had a similar issue at work, where when we switch the power on surges would damage all the equipment in the building.
Like you said all household surge plugs is just not economical for the equipment.

The best solution for this is to have a surge protector installed in the main DB on the incoming power supply(Please note you might need the "municipality" there if its called that to switch off the incoming feed of before installing this)
Not sure what the item is exactly called. It looks like a circuit breaker in the DB and has a fuse. ie if the surge is very bad you might have to change the fuse on the protector...

[Stu]

Good advice, however I don't see the municipality coming over and switching off the mains... Or do these kind of services operate well were you are Geth? It's risky but you guy's might be on your own with the installation?

[Thor_23]

Just checked with the mines electrical foreman.
An example of what I was ref to can be found on the folowing website:

http://www.dehn.de/

there is local suppliers(in SA) for the products....

Use google to translate ;)

Also, most decent forms of intervention would require you put a measure in place between the main inlet and the rest of the house. Also, there is smaller measures where you can protect a certain breaker and maybe plug the pc's in on only that breaker? That would not need the municipality as far as I am aware....

[Megageth]

Thanks for all the feedback, will read up on those links and see what I can find.
Don't worry about installation, power goes down regularly twice a week on scheduled days and will be done by a local sucker technician.