ADSL Surge Protection

Hi Guy's

I agree with all comments so far, with any wire connected system surge protection is a must if you not around to pull the plugs in a storm. Where I am, lightning strikes are very common, and damage is regular to unprotected gear.

The trick is to protect EVERY wired connection into and out of a computer set up. I have the ADSL line, power and cat 5 network wires to other rooms in the house. All of these are protected by the same protection set up.

I use a set of surge protection devices that DSE sells. The base unit is a Panamax Max 6. It is a 6 outlet power board, that can have all types of signal protection modules that can be connected to it.

Unfortunately the base power unit is not available in AUS as the supplier let their 5 year electrical approvals lapse. As a result the unit is currently being retested. If they had reapplied for their approvals to be extended before they lapsed the unit would still be on the shelves. Basically a paper work stuff up that should have been avoided. DSE head office have told me that reapproval is in progress. Despite this i have found this to be a very effective protection system at a reasonable price.

For the technical people on the forum: The surge protection on the mains side has 6 MOVs in 2 groups of 3 arranged A-N, A-E, N-E with the usual common mode filter between the 2 groups. There is an earth terminal that a special clip that attaches to the signal protectors.

The telco 2 wire protector, has a 3 terminal gas arrestor on the input side, 2 series HI volt poly switches in series with the line and a shunt transorb on the output side of it. The centre terminal of the gas arrestor goes to the mains earth via the metal clip.

Its effect to the normal ADSL signal would be a small amount of extra shunt capacitance that may just be enough to degrade an ADSL service that is right at the limit of line length, but otherwise I have found the effect is not visible at all.

I had a direct lightning hit to a pole with the telco wires on it at the end of last year, and the modem lost sync as a result of the hit, but re-synced and was working fine about 30 seconds later. This speaks well for the protection device!

Peter.