By William Mead
Los Alamos

At election time it might be good to have some “power” humor.

We have a friend in White Rock who recently had a computer zapped by a power “outage”, even though it was on a surge suppressor. That got us wondering how you can tell if a surge suppressor still works. In the search, we happened on this great (perhaps apocryphal) story.

“Here’s a story: Back when I was doing power supplies one product needed a qualification test to see if it would safely isolate itself from the AC line for a fault. Isolation was achieved by using a huge (size of a frozen orange juice can) SCR to short the input and literally fuse the input wiring. Hey, the method was in the unit design spec for this military supply.

“So … unit was wired up, fault simulated and … the breaker in the power panel opened. So the unit was moved to the AC panel to the main breaker, the fault simulated and … our entire company went dark till the main breaker was reset.

“So … after some discussion the unit was connected before the main breaker to the power coming into the building. The fault was simulated and … the whole town went dark for 3 hours.

“They didn’t ask us and no one told.

“The unit was then redesigned with smaller wire. I am happy to say I was not involved with this effort, but I did get the afternoon off.”

From https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/threads/how-to-test-a-surge-supressor.73404/ by ErnieM.

PS – Nobody seems to have a good way to test a surge suppressor.
PPS – Please vote!!