Power Conditioners

1. All There Is To Know About It Power Conditioners:

2. Over the past few years, power consumption in all sectors has increased exponentially, thanks to the increased demand from practically all the sectors. In fact, the few areas that did not consume power a decade back or so, have also joined the club. This, in turn, has paved way for new techniques of manufacturing better equipment for all purposes ranging from residential to industrial. • The other side of this increased demand of power is the increased risk of power outage and fluctuations. While planned outages provide scope of saving the equipment from damage and loss of revenue, fluctuations are riskier because of their unexpected nature. They are more likely to cause harm to the equipment and personnel resulting in mishaps ranging from loss of data and revenue to damage to property and personnel.

3. That’s where Power Conditioners come into the picture. Not to be confused with surge protectors which guard the equipment from unexpected voltage fluctuations, power conditioners are built to clean the AC power signal that enters the equipment and rid the power of overheads and interferences from other equipment or signals. As a result, we now have a more reliable power supply entering our equipment, allowing it to give us better output – better network operations, improved modem throughput, superior picture quality on the cable network, and enhanced output on the audio/video in the home theatre systems. • Not only as power conditioners useful in a normal situation, but their role becomes particularly important during power storms or main power line failure to protect delicate electronic equipment and give the systems time enough to shut down safely without loss of data and consequent loss of revenue.

4. Performance Parameters of a Power Conditioner • A good power conditioner consists of a filter banks, which go to the different power outlets connected to the equipment with varying power requirements. This reduces the interference between components, thus reducing the noise in the output. This value of noise suppression is expressed in decibels or dB, and is a very important factor in determining the quality of equipment. A very high quality of equipment has a high value of noise suppression in dB. • A power conditioner also consists of a suppressor which absorbs momentary voltage spike, and then passes smooth AC power to the equipment connected to it. However, as anything else, this suppressor also has a limit of absorbing voltage spikes before it fails. This limit is measured by joule rating. The joule rating measures the amount of electrical energy the suppressor can absorb before failing. As it goes without saying, higher the joule rating, higher the capacity of the suppressor and better the quality of the power conditioner.

5. Applications of the Power Conditioner • While the name “power conditioner” can give the sense of being used only in a huge industrial setup, it is not so. The application of a power conditioner is wherever equipment needs to be protected from voltage fluctuations, and that can range from a residential setup to small office to huge corporate offices housing large data centers.

6. With increasing cost of equipment because of the sophisticated technology used in their development, it becomes very essential to maintain them and protect them from unusual electric activity. Depending on the equipment and the requirement, power conditioners come in various sizes and shapes. There are power conditioners that may be small enough to fit in a printed circuit board, and there are ones which are big enough to manage huge power plants in an industrial environment. Power conditioners can also be classified based on the function they perform – while there are devices that provide only surge protection, they are more multi-tasking devices that deal with more power quality issues in the system.