Thanks!

Ditto! Thank you very much!

D for Dont need no fuse ;-)

I'd concur with that. I wonder how many surge protectors in use are actually providing protection any more. I seen a fair few that aren't. People just tend to assume the wouldn't work at all if that was the case.

I have found the surge protectors that offer an attached device warranty are the ones that will shut off when they stop protecting. I’m constantly checking family and friends computers to verify they’re plugged in to a proper surge protector. Since I’m going to be the one that has to replace their power supply. They are always so confused that I tell them their surge protector did not protect them when they were plugged into one that didn’t shut off.

and this is why I read the comments, knowledge is power.

It's just the built-in mic on the iPad.

Rudofaux nope

- but that's ok ;-)

Big Clive must be a Scot. The English would say "fatang". :-)

Yes that is correct. Once I saw a surge protector after lightning strike catch fire a little while afterwards. Not at my place somewhere else. Use the fire extinguisher on that one. Also nice user image I see your fan of Lego. On what Minifigures did that come from I'm sure it's an hodgepodge of them. Are you with adult fan of white girl like me?

That could look quite nice.

Yes, so easy to grab the live conductors as well. No wonder the standard method to remove is to pull out by the cord, because the plug is small, there is no sleeved end and of course the sockets have no switches to disconnect them either.

@@SeanBZA - Yet as a Canadian I never hear about anyone touching the live connector. They aren't hard to pull out but true that some people are lazy and grab the cord. They take the abuse. 120V is great for the vast majority of items and we have 208 and 240V for the big stuff. We do have switched sockets but they are usually just for a lamp outlet on the other side of the room. Don't need it otherwise.

This is a common anomaly on phone cameras

It doesn't break the connection, it just sits in parallel with the load and shunts any excess supply voltage to earth.

Dave Pusey, Ah ok. Thanks for explaining.

@@davepusey Thanks. I feel like, unusually for Clive, the video was rather lacking in explanation for how it actually works.

@@davepusey Since there is a thermal fuse in series with the MOV, it would probably blow the thermal fuse and protect the MOV during a surge. The connected device will still be connected to the outlet without any protection.

You may have a point there but it's probably because the car me and stuff but I don't know anyone that guy comments on that?

@Matt Quinn thanks so much matt, don't know how that happened, much appreciated, took a bit of fiddling but sorted, not the same watching it with subtitles, lol

Yes.. no.. maybe? Probably erring more towards yes, but it's a fairly basic level of protection to begin with.

FFS-It's a neon indicator !- Sheech !!

@@davidworsley7969 Too much coffee, lad. I was referring to the picture quality. Did you get enough sleep?

@@Peter_S_ You were ?....Well.....Who'd have thought ? ZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

@@davidworsley7969 When is the last time you saw a neon indicator that had a sharp image in the upper right but the left 1/3 of the image seems quite soft? Doesn't add up.

@@Peter_S_ You woke me up to ask me that ? Where is your humanity ?

Any you push & twist the bulb to fit it. Normally referred to as 'bayonet' upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Bayonet_lightbulb_and_socket.jpg

Because with 10% tolerance a non-trivial number will conduct every cycle, and even those which don't will have short lives. Plus, the greater energy dissipated will cause more heating of the MOV and shorten their lives even further.

I'm quite happy with the colour.

Possible, but also unlikely. For that to occur, the Neutral to Earth MOV would have to be shorted.

Clive has the insulation tester which goes to 1kV or more if i'm right. it should clamp down to around 270V then.

@@PsiQ Being 470V MOVs, I'd go with closer to, uh, 470V.

@@Monkeh616 um, aah, was thinking of the ones i've seen lately which were rated at 275V/1mA i think Was it 230V +/- 10% for allowed tolerance ? (Wouldnt work for 230 x 1.4 peak hmmm )

@@PsiQ Something rated at 275V was probably rated for AC - which makes it a 390V part.

but brass springy bits sounds way better

It's not what they call them in the railway industry. There, they call them..... ....BUFFERS !

@@millomweb Thanks, I LOL'd :-)

@@theskett It's true ! I should have gone to bed an hour ago :)

Often appliances with high inductive loads like motors can cause spikes.

It's probably the slight voltage dip cause by the fridge compressor kicking on. Not something a simple filter will help with.

@@bigclivedotcom thanks... I know I can't expect you to... but can you suggest any potential solutions? Its annoying RN but if I want to game its gonna be a "game changer" in all the wrong ways!!

Neon indicator doesnt require stepping down the voltage, just throw a small resistor in. makes it cheaper for simple things that aren't using a transformer or voltage dropper of some kind to begin with.

@@SenorBolsa Thank you for the explanation 🙂👍

Is WB such a big issue ? I loved the way filming grass from under a blue tarpaulin turns the grass yellow.

They don't carry any relevant amount of current in normal operation..

@@Monkeh616 "in normal operation" which is what, charging yer phone or heating up yer caravan?

@@Io1564 Doesn't matter. The load current of the device does not go through those contacts.

Yes. Just shunts transient spikes.

@@bigclivedotcom Would they protect against a nearby lightening strike? Is so I will buy a few for my computers etc. Excellent video, thanks Clive.

@@gromett Are you asking if the computers will be fine after the house has been vaporised by a lightning strike ? I suspect the first thing you should do is assess the likelihood of a strike. This could be an interesting consideration for when I next trim the trees.

@@millomweb he did say nearby strike :-) but it would be impressive if the house was blown to bits and the computer was standing there good as new :-)

@@gromett Power line surge suppressors alone won't save you, you need proper grounding so surges don't travel through alternate paths such as AC->PC->HDMI->TV->STB->coax. For higher value equipment, I'd rather have a better-rounded surge suppressor with in-line chokes (ex.: Tripp-Lite isobar) to soften transients and give its multiple 20Dxxx MOVs a better fighting chance against whatever is left.

Remind me where the end of a ring circuit is again?

@@Monkeh616 end of the house and start of the house, I guess having one plugged into each room would work as well, the more you have more likely they adsorbed the spike over each spd but generally they more effective if they are before the device that is been supplied like an extension cable with all your electronics plugged into that (or in the consumer unit as is starting to happen ) Belkin with there surge master line socket and 4-8 way extension leads having doing it for a very long time

@@Monkeh616 The two ends of a ring main are the first socket and the last socket going clockwise or anticlockwise in the southern hemisphere.

@@petehiggins33 First socket from where? It's a ring. And yes, I appreciate you mean the first one along the run from the CU. These really only provide very, very basic protection, though.

@@Monkeh616 Clearly it would be better to fit a proper surge protection device like this tinyurl.com/r8a2vpf in the consumer unit but they are expensive and should only be fitted by an 'electrician'. But if you were thinking of using these relative cheapies to protect a couple of appliances then my suggestion would give the same level of protection to all the sockets on the ring for the same cost. You need to use two because the transient will travel in both directions around the ring and the suppressors will only protect sockets downstream of the wiring.

It came from a UK supplier called CPC.

Of course, but you may as well get one with more substantial surge protection built into it..

I'd rather use it at the female end, to get the length of the cable to take the power of the transients when the mov's clamp down.

@@LeifNelandDk You can certainly do that, but there's not enough impedance in the extension cable (otherwise it'd get hot...) to make any significant difference.

Yes. They conduct above a voltage threshold and are intended to clamp short duration voltage spikes.

They do fail progressively over time with each transient absorbed, just as you mentioned.

@@bigclivedotcom Can they cause ghost RCD trips when they age then?

@@uK8cvPAq They can, although usually they're terrifyingly hot before that occurs, which is where the thermal fuses come in.

Anywhere you want a little extra protection from mains borne spikes and transients. Like a computer.

The spring contacts are maybe 100 milliohms. The MOVs kick in at 470V. You're not going to get 4700A in any domestic environment, so the spring contact resistance doesn't matter at all.

Spring contacts are, say 100 milliohms but are inductive and so their impedance to fast transients will be way more than 0.1Ohm but yea, all good either way

A guy tested MOVs, spark gaps, clamp diodes, everything failed except the MOVs. The MOV clamps the spike immediately with absolutely no overshoot. I am not an expert but I heard here and there that MOVs stop working after they receive certain amount of spikes through them. They conduct and overheat and start a fire, that's why they go with thermal fuses. Maybe a ferrite filter is a better option? Maybe a small cap with discharge resistor after the MOV is a good idea, it would take the energy of the spike but would not let it overheat if it fails. Oh wait, that's too expensive ... you know how it goes, plastic metalized wires are our future! :)

The protection is in parallel it clamps voltage spikes.

These are metal oxide varistors , if you connected one in series with your equipment then it would get 0 power unless there was a spike then it would get the spike lol, and go back to being off. Basically giving you only spikes. Think of a how a diode is like a one way check valve, these are like a 2 way 'check valve' but with a very stiff spring (though they are not built with diode it's just an analogy)

So was the meter running backwards ? ;)

I'll do you one better. My boss sent me to one of his rental properties to take a look at why the circuit breaker for the barn out behind the house kept blowing. He had just had some work done there by a "professional electrician." Now, for purposes of understanding the problem, I'll explain a bit about American electrical systems. Most devices use 120 volts, and larger devices such as air conditioners, ovens, etc. use 240 volts. The transformer that supplies the property has a 240 volt secondary that is center tapped, with the center tap being referenced to ground (Earth) and serving as the neutral on 120v circuits. The two live wires go in to the circuit breaker panel (consumer unit) and the bus bars alternate so that every other slot uses one live wire and the others use the other one. For a 240v circuit, you have a double pole circuit breaker with one pole on each of the live wires, so that they have a potential of 240v between each other. When you run electricity to an outbuilding, you'll run 4 wires: live 1, live 2, neutral, and ground (Earth) Those will go to a sub-panel with circuit breakers for the outbuilding, and a large, double pole main breaker supplying that will be in the main breaker box in the house. Back to the story. The "professional electrician" that had done the work previously had installed a new subpanel in the barn. In the process, he had connected one live to one live busbar, as you're supposed to, the other live to the neutral bar, and the neutral to the other live bar. Being a subpanel, the neutral and ground aren't bonded together- that's only done at the service entrance, otherwise you can wind up with the ground carrying current. So the installation didn't just short out as soon as power was connected. The result was that half of the outlets and lighting was wired with reverse polarity, and the other half had 240v instead of 120v. Naturally, the things that were plugged in to those outlets didn't like it. So someone else was sent out to see what was going on. Upon discovering that half the outlets had 240 volts, did he go and look at the panel to try and figure out why? No. He just disconnected those outlets and connected them to the circuits that had 120v, and called it a day. So now, you have reverse polarity at all of the outlets. Long story short, there was a security light that comes on when it gets dark that had been connected to one of the 220v circuits, and was damaged by that, such that it had a short circuit in it when turned on. So every night, it would blow the main breaker- because the circuit breakers in the subpanel were connected to neutral, where they were essentially useless. Fortunately, nothing disastrous happened, but it did take me the better part of two days to 1) figure out what the hell was going on, and 2) get it properly sorted, since I had to rewire half the outlets to connect them to the proper circuits.

The MOVs are in parallel with the appliance to be protected, so should shunt out any high-voltage transients. At some point, the MOVs may reach end-of-life, become conductive, trip out the fuses; at that point, the neon will no longer light and (if you check the neon) you'll know to replace the plug-top [so as to get some new MOVs]. It's not exactly fail-safe (!! :-) but it's probably better than nothin' :-)

Nearly all "surge protectors" have this problem, they are parallel connected and do not disconnect the appliance when they fail. So they may absorb some surges, but if a really bad one comes along it will blow out the surge protector and continue it's merry way on to the appliance.

Franko Walker yea it is useful

4K would be difficult to upload on the outdated Internet services here. I think the camera I was using here was over compressing the images.

Too wide a view. I tried one a while ago.

@@bigclivedotcom too wide isn't a big issue, but I just remembered you post videos with minimal video editing. I bet you could ask us to sample what phones we have. I'm sure some us would be happy to help. Tells us what height from bench, recording area, video camera features needed.

possibly due to the location of the 2 thermal fuses, one mov doesnt get one.

@@waldsteiger but it's symmetric?

If you have reversed polarity and that MOV fails, there is no thermal fuse to act on it - the one carrying the current is located under the wrong MOV. The fuse will likely still end up opening eventually, but it's not an ideal arrangement. This is however a relatively small risk - we have polarised plugs and generally polarity is correct in our installations.

@@Monkeh616 there's a thermal fuse on both the live and neutral terminals. Whether reversed polarity or not, no current can flow without going through a thermal fuse?

@@yadt the movs are not protected. its when the mov is already dead or dying (they get hot), then the thermal fuse cuts out to protect the load.

You could do that. A surge protector should last a long time if it isn't on a very spiky supply.

Yep and say so.

When a power surge occurs those MOV´s short out the plugs. So the electricity flows through them, and not into your device.

When a power surge occurs those MOV´s short out the plugs so the electricity runs through them, not into your device.

@@SharkoonBln thanks so it blows the fuse then in the plug

@@Rob1972Gem Those MOV absorb the spike. They get hot while doing this, so they will be fine absorbing spikes, but no long occurence of overvoltage.

@@Rob1972Gem No, it shouldn't. These are for transient overvoltage protection - very short durations, nothing like enough to blow a fuse.

Currently. I'll break free, someday! You can't resist me forever.

Watt’s the charge? 😁

They are always safer as the live is the wire that's fused and switched inside the appliance. Unpolarized plug, appliance switch off, appliance 50% chance of being live inside.

@@MarkTillotson Which is irrelevant as there's such a thing as isolation. Functional switching is not the same thing, and if the two are a confusing concept you shouldn't be inside the appliance..

It will shunt spikes and transients. It wouldn't deal too well with a direct lightning strike.

@@bigclivedotcom Very little does, really.. Lightning has a tendency to win.

@@bigclivedotcom I feel like I'm missing some basic knowledge here because I can't see how a circuit can protect a device while the circuit to the device remains in place, if you know what I mean. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it doesn't work, I just can't see how it does work.

​@@Akira42 The MOVs become temporarily low-resistance when the voltage rises high enough to trigger them, causing a temporary short circuit. Because the electrical wiring has non-zero impedance, the short circuit causes voltage drop in the wiring, dragging down the voltage and protecting the appliance. Normally this will only be for a very short period of time (milliseconds). Considering each MOV individually, the wiring and the MOV together form a potential divider across the origin of the voltage spikes. When the MOV is not conducting, its resistance is much, much higher than that of the wiring, so most of the potential difference (voltage) is across the MOV and thus also across whichever parts of the appliance the MOV is in parallel with. When the voltage rises and the MOV begins to conduct, the MOV's share of the total circuit resistance falls, and thus its share of the potential difference also falls. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong.)

@@patrickwigmore3462 Thanks for explaining, I think I get it now. The devices don't get 'in the way' of the surge, they draw it away from the equipment instead and dissipate it, I guess is how I would put it?

As far as I know it's a post war thing when there was a copper shortage so new homes had a ring circuit configuration requiring all plugs to have their own fuses for protection

British socket circuits are in a Ring Topology to increase capacity and save copper. This increased capacity is far more than is safe for any flexible cord. The overcurrent devices having the increased capacity will not reliably trip quickly enough if there is a fault involving a cord increasing the risk of fire. By adding a fuse in the plug the British were able to safely use smaller cords on their appliances without the risk of fire in the event of a fault. A fuse is also required whenever there is a spur off of a ring in fixed wiring.

Because of relatively high current (30/32A) ring final circuits. A small flexible cable (up to about 1.5mm²) could fail catastrophically under such currents, so they're fused at the plugs. Most other countries will use 16A, sometimes 20A, circuits, which even a 1mm² or smaller cable is likely to be able to sustain for some time.

It's a regulation. UK standard. Very thoughtful of them!

@@jrmcferren No, a fuse isn't required for a spur. 433.1.204.

The Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish stuff is equally as good.

@@speedbird073 The Manx stuff is OK, too.

If the US upgraded to an accident reporting protocol that produced and published statistics comparable with British statistics, we could easily tell just how much better. Note that the current US administration is actually working to reduce the gathering and timely publishing of accident statistics.

@@speedbird073 Cornish and Isle of Dogs too

@@speedbird073 I'm in North wales, electricity hasn't reached us yet. Got a few barrels of whale oil to use first.

Check your surround sound settings. Dolby will be sending all the audio to a missing middle speaker.