"Anthony" wrote in message
. ..
Richard J Kinch wrote in
:


A lot of electronics failures are blamed on bad power, when they're
just poorly made to start with. Convenient excuse for the
manufacturer facing a warranty claim. This has been going on since
the early 80s when the phony power filtering racket got its start as
an add-on to PC sales when margins started to shrink after the initial
IBM PC blitz. Lots of propaganda.


I'll have to disagree here. I have a considerable amount of experience
with CNC equipment. There is not a machine that I know of that could not
benefit from supply power filtering, especially if you have more than one
piece of equipment in the shop.
The facility I am currently employed with has over 1000 CNC machines,
among other types of equipment, some of them huge power users. You would
probably be amazed at the transients and other power problems present.
The machines we have filters/conditioners/suppressors on have
dramatically reduced electrical problems compared to non-conditioned
machines. This includes drive failures, power supply failures, and
sensor failures. In the process of adding conditioners to the rest, on a
worst-machine basis.

--
Anthony

You can't 'idiot proof' anything....every time you try, they just make
better idiots.

Remove sp to reply via email

Hi,
I work for a power company, and in one of my earlier roles worked in the
test section, the section where all the difficult power quality issues ended
up. One that I recall involved a CNC machine shop, the owner was very angy
that we were supplying him with poor quality power and damaging his
machinery. We installed a dranetz power line analyser, and boy was there
some crap in his power systems, it was a wonder anything worked at all.

The thing is though, we don't supply crap power, well mostly anyway. By
crap power, I mean power that is still on, but full of dips and spikes. We
do on occasion fail to supply any power, but it's excellent quality grin
We can on occasion, have failures in our voltage regulation equipment , and
supply the wrong voltage, and while low voltages can cause motors to burn,
it's still very rare on our network. It's also very rare for our equipment
to mess up the quality of the power supply. The only thing we can do to
pollute the nice clean stuff we get from the generators is burning
connections, and they dont usually last very long once they begin to burn.
Where 99 percent of the crap comes from is customer loads, either the
customer themselves is doing it, or a close neighbor.

In the case of the cnc shop above, he was doing it to himself. One of
his lathes was causing such a disturbance that was destroying his other
machines. Putting in filter/conditioners/suppressors as Anthony suggests is
good advice, but don't do it thinking that it's the power companies fault,
because a Richard said, it's the crap circuitry in your expensive CNC stuff
thats really caused you to part with the green stuff.

The exception to that is if the crap is spewing out of your neighbors
shed, thats were the power companies real role comes in, protecting
customers from other customers. So Ken, have a look at what is around that
machine that's having all the problems, it might be obvious where it's
coming from. Anyone in the area making concrete reinforcing mesh? How about
an arc furnace, or induction furnace?

regards,

John