Surge protectors and fuses
by Chris Woodford. Last updated: August 8, 2011.
When lightning strikes, it's
exciting and exhilarating—but it's scary
too. It's scary because it's dangerous: leaping bolts of lightning
contain huge amounts of electrical energy
that are released in a
fraction of a second. If lightning strikes near your home, all that
electricity has to go somewhere. One
place it may go is through the
electrical wiring system in your home, damaging or destroying any
electrical items that are plugged in at the time. It's almost
impossible to stop lightning from damaging your things, and it's
generally best to unplug whatever you can well before a storm
arrives. Another helpful thing you can do is install surge
protectors. These cheap, compact cubes and power strips help to
even-out sudden peaks of electricity in the supply and reduce the
chances of damage to sensitive electronic equipment. Let's take a closer look at
how they work.
Photo: A typical UK surge protector built into
a cube. This one is made by Belkin; other brands include APC, Ativa, and Hubbell.
What are surges?
Electricity comes into your home from a wiring system that starts at
a power
plant some distance away. Different appliances in your home need
larger or smaller amounts of electric power. Things that get hot
(electric showers, toasters, and
stoves) need large currents that
supply a lot of power at once, whereas electronic equipment (CD
players, televisions, and so on)
needs much smaller currents and uses less
power. All these appliances assume that the electricity coming into
your home has a reasonably constant voltage.
But sometimes the voltage fluctuates because of sudden changes in
the way power is supplied from the grid. Or it can happen
if someone switches on an
appliance with a powerful electric motor
inside it (such as a drill,
a vacuum cleaner, or an electric lawn
mower), it can cause a sudden
surge or drop in power in the whole circuit in your home. A very
brief change in voltage is called a spike. A
longer-lasting
change is called a surge. A spike or surge
won't affect other
big appliances, but it could harm tiny components in sensitive
electronic equipment. What we need is something that smooths out any
peaks in the voltage—and that's what surge protectors do.
How surge protectors work
The appliances you use draw their power from sockets in the wall.
The
power from the sockets feeds straight into the appliance down a
length of cable. In a surge protector, the main power line (known as
the hot wire or live wire)
has an extra connection (a
kind of "side road") linked to it that feeds to the ground
wire (sometimes also called the Earth wire;
the protective
wire in an electric circuit that sends any unwanted current safely
into the earth). Normally, the surge connection is inactive. However,
if a larger than normal voltage appears, and produces too much
electric current, the excess current is diverted safely down the side
road to ground. That means no more current than normal flows into
your appliance, so it's better protected from harm.
How does the surge connection know when to divert the current? It is
actually
a device called a varistor (voltage-dependent
resistor), made from a substance called a metal-oxide
semiconductor,
which is usually a bad
conductor (carrier) of electricity. When an excessive voltage
appears, the semiconductor in the varistor becomes a good conductor and
starts to carry electricity normally. For as long as the surge
voltage lasts, the semiconductor channels harmful current to ground.
Once things return to normal, the semiconductor switches back again.
All this means your appliance is not only protected during a
surge—it should keep on working normally.
Artwork: Left: Without a surge protector, the
hot/live (brown) and neutral (blue) connections provide power to your
appliance. The ground (green) connection is typically wired to the
metal case to provide a safe way for stray currents to escape, but it's
not involved in powering the appliance.
Right: With a surge protector, there is an
extra connection from the hot/live wire to the ground. If a surge
current flows in down the hot/live wire, any excess current is safely
diverted round the surge wire (red) to the ground/earth. NB: This
example features typical UK wiring.
Why surge protectors don't give you total protection?
It's important to note that surge protectors don't give you complete
protection.
A direct lightning strike is an absolutely massive discharge of
electricity; a surge protector probably won't stop such a huge surge
from damaging things in your home.
Surge protectors are also of limited value when surges last some time
and they don't protect against higher than expected currents from the
power grid.
Fuses
When a fuse goes, you can often hear it blowing out with a sharp
CRACK! that plunges your home into sudden darkness. It's a real nuisance when this happens late at night—but the alternative is much
worse. If we didn't have fuses, electrical faults could start fires
in our homes and burn them to the ground. Thank heavens, then, for
these tiny electric protectors that keep us safe. Let's find out what
they are and how they work!
Photo: The fuse inside an electrical plug (wired for the UK electricity system).
The fuse is the brown vertical cylinder on the right.
Why do we need fuses?
If you've read our long article on electricity,
you'll know that an electric current is a flow of electrons (tiny particles inside atoms) carrying energy through a
metal or another substance in a loop called a circuit. You'll also
know that electricity can be extremely dangerous: it's not something
to mess with if you value your life. The electricity that comes to
our homes from power plants travels at
incredibly high voltages
because that helps to save energy. Transformers
in substations near to buildings turn the high voltage power into lower voltages that the
appliances in our homes can safely use.
Photo: Two glass cylinder fuses from a household fusebox.
These are rated at 30 amps.
The electrical system is incredibly reliable but it does,
occasionally, go wrong. Lightning can strike power lines causing a
surge in voltage that rushes into our homes. Or a surge can happen if
electrical equipment is switched on and off too rapidly. Sometimes
faults occur when the appliances in our homes malfunction or when
rodents chew through wires. For a whole variety of reasons, the
cables running into our appliances may suddenly find themselves
carrying much more voltage than they should. If we didn't have fuses,
power surges could damage our televisions,
radios, computers,
and light bulbs, cause fires, and maybe even put our lives at risk.
How fuses work
You probably know that wires get hot when electricity travels
through them. That's how ordinary, incandescent lamps work. Electricity flows through a very thin wire called a filament making
it so hot that it gives off light. The same idea is at work in an
electric toaster. Here, electricity
flows through a series of thin
metal ribbons, making them so hot that they produce enough heat to
cook bread. A fuse is exactly the same. It's a thin piece of wire
designed to carry a limited electrical current. If you try to pass a
higher current through the wire, it'll heat up so much that it burns
or melts. When it melts, it breaks the circuit it's fitted to and
stops the current flowing.
We fit fuses in different places in our homes. In some countries,
such as the UK, fuses are fitted into plugs on every appliance that
connects to an electrical outlet. Different appliances draw different
amounts of current, so an electric toaster will need a higher fuse
(typically 13 amp) than an electric light (usually just 3 amp).
Types of fuseboxes
Photo: An old-fashioned fusebox. This one has four fuses inside four brown Bakelite
fuse holders, each fuse protecting a separate circuit inside a house. If one fuse blows, the other three should remain unaffected.
The entire supply can be switched on and off with the little red switch on the right. That switches all four circuits
on or off at the same time.
There are also fuses fitted at the junction where the main
electricity supply flows into your home. This is called the junction
box or fusebox. It divides the incoming electricity into a number of
separate circuits and feeds them to different parts of your home. A
high-power circuit feeds large items like electric cookers, while
lower-rated circuits feed lights and other appliances. Having
different parts of your home on separate circuits means that a
failure in one circuit doesn't stop the others from working.
Typically each circuit in your home is fitted with its own fuse.
In older fuseboxes, the fuse is just a bare piece of wire connected
between two terminals. More recent fuseboxes have replaceable
cartridge fuses with the fuse wire built into a glass cylinder that
you can easily snap in and out. The latest fuseboxes do away with
fuses altogether and have trip switches instead. If a fault occurs,
the fusebox detects the problem instantly and the trip switch
automatically switches off whichever circuits are affected. Once
you've identified and solved the problem, you can simply flip the
switch back to get the power working again.
Photo: A modern fusebox like this one, made by Wylex, uses trip-switches instead
of fuse wire or cartridges. The left photo shows the entire fusebox; the right photo shows a close-up
of the trip switches. If there's too much current flowing in one of the circuits, the switch for that
circuit flips over and cuts off the electricity. You can restore the power by flipping the switch back again (after
correcting whatever caused the problem). Half the circuits in this fusebox are fitted with automatic
RCD (residual-current device) protection, which greatly reduce the risk of electric shocks when you accidentally cut through power cables.
What's the difference between a surge protector and a fuse?
A fuse is designed to stop sudden large electric currents from damaging the
equipment in your house. Sounds the same as a surge protector,
doesn't it? But it actually works a different way. Most fuses are
very thin pieces of wire designed to allow only so much current
through them. The thicker the wire, the more current can flow; so fuses
rated for higher currents usually have thicker pieces of wire inside
them.
How does a fuse work? If there's too much current (for example, if
you've put too many appliances together on one socket), the fuse literally burns
out: the wire gets so hot that it melts and interrupts the circuit to
protect you. Occasionally, fuses actually "blow": the current
flowing through them is so great that they burn out instantly
with a loud cracking noise. A fuse, then, is a very drastic form of
protection: if anything happens, it shuts off the electricity
completely. A surge protector is designed to smooth out smaller
fluctuations in voltage and it doesn't normally shut down the circuit
when a problem occurs. You need both fuses and surge protectors for good
protection from electrical problems.
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