Schematics for brick wall

Surge protection devices

They may do better than other systems with a missing ground but I very much doubt they are better than other systems that have a proper ground in place

Dan

-- Dan Hollands

Great link, thanks!

Does anybody know the different stages in the Brick Wall? Their site gives some idea, but looking on the net I can't find enough details to really understand it.

Unless you obtain a Brick Wall unit and strip it down and surmise its operation, I doubt you will find any meaningful technical data on it. However, from their web pages I gleaned this piece of info;

Brick Wall surge protector products are based on the current (hence voltage) limiting of a massive inductor. Residual energy that leaks through is captured by a series of electrolytic capacitors. There it is slowly leaked back to the neutral at a harmless level. Outside of trivial amounts of parasitic capacitance our Series Mode surge protectors do not put any surge current on the ground of your systems. Engineers of an MOV based surge protector face the dilemma of what to do with potentially large amounts of surge current. They don?t want to overload the neutral and want to prolong the life of the MOV. Using two MOV's and diverting equally between the ground and neutral wire prolongs MOV life and prevents overcurrent on the neutral. Series Mode surge protector technology presents no such dilemma.

Reading the blog on their pages does not fill me with confidence as to the effectiveness of their apparently "amazing technology".

The manufacturer has put out this documentation (for what it's worth)

Series mode protectors are simply low pass filters. Some will make protectors 'sound' as if something more. Text will hype energy storage devices and other irrelevant concepts such as 'does not work until so much voltage first occurs'. It's all nice. But then they even forget to mention a wire that carries destructive transients completely bypassing the series mode protector.

It's a low pass filter. Nothing magical or miraculous about it. It's a low pass filter. And what do many electronics already contain? A low pass filter.

If the technical documents do not def> >>I've learned the importance of a good ground for surge protection.

Basically it is more line filter than surge suppressor. I hope that that they do not have electrolytic capacitors as they are not normally AC components (They are polarized / have distinct plus and minus terminals like a battery). They do have a point about not using ground to conduct surge currents.