We recently had some nasty storms come through in one of our Canopy communities and some of our customers (only if they had a router) lost their internet connections. After investigation it seems that the internet/wan port is fried. On these installs we didn’t install the surge suppressors.
Now the reason we stopped putting them in is in normal week to week operation we receive 5x the amount of support calls on the ones that have the suppressors. We live in an area with smaller communities and it’s very common that the customers utility grounds are not very good. This was actually the first time we’ve had a problem without them. Another note, these customers had the canopy power supply plugged directly to the wall and not in a surge protected outlet.
Now for the questions:
1. Can we just install the surge suppressor without grounding it and it still be effective?
2. Would forcing the customer to put the power supply in a surge protected outlet prevent this from happening again?
3. Is there a better solution for surge suppression that we could use instead of the canopy provided option?
4. I’ve seen an inline suppressor that grounds to the computer case, would that me a good option?
Any opinions or answers are greatly appreciated.
Just another thought…
1. Install suppressor with power supply injector plugged into one side. (this results in fried radios)
2. Install suppressor with line from outside on one side and line to power supply in the other (this can result in fried ethernet ports).
What’s really odd is, 3 weeks ago the same town had a big power surge in which I had to go around and replace the power supplies, nothing more. Now they had a lightning storm, no bad power supplies but now we have bad ports?
no thoughts or opinions?
Radelon wrote:
1. Can we just install the surge suppressor without grounding it and it still be effective?
2. Would forcing the customer to put the power supply in a surge protected outlet prevent this from happening again?
3. Is there a better solution for surge suppression that we could use instead of the canopy provided option?
4. I've seen an inline suppressor that grounds to the computer case, would that me a good option?
1. No. The surge suppressor uses ground to function
2. No, but they should have that at a minimum, ideally a UPS
3. Not really. The Canopy SS is fine
4. Interesting, can you send a link?
That looks promising.
I would ground it to the outlet that the router/computer surge suppressor is plugged into assuming the outlet is grounded. Or, if you can find them, surge suppressors with a ground lug.
However, I think I would STRONGLY recommend one of these with the emphasis being on the higher quality unit: http://www.tripplite.com/products/suppr … =Recommend
This will help protect not just the router/SM, but also the monitor, PC, router, cordless phone, printer, fax, scanner, etc, etc.
If you are in high lighting environments, you should still use the Canopy suppressor and ground it to the AC power panel as per code.