On June 6, 2017 at 13:46, Ernie Gilman said...
Thanks for the suggestions about adding capacitors, etc. I might do that in my home system but that's completely taboo in any commercial anything. Warranties are voided, performance can be affected.
True, and caps only help on DC power applications, but they still don't work as well as a battery.
For instance, when you thought about adding a capacitor to the DC so the DC will stay high longer after a power loss, what did you engineer into the system so that the power supply is safe when power comes on and the large capacitor must be charged? Capacitors look like shorts when discharged, and the better and beefier the capacitor, the longer it would stress the supply when powering on. That is, the better this would work to hold the DC up after a power loss, the more dangerous it would be to the power supply. Unless you add a transistor, some resistors, etc...
We did add resistors and after people made big sparks while making their direct connections for initial charge-up, most of the manufacturers included a resistor with the cap. Some of us just put small light bulbs in series, to limit the current and see when it was charged. Most of these caps were in the .5F-1.5F range, so they definitely held enough charge to do some serious damage.
And at that point, is the supply operating within the parameters specified by its UL rating?
I didn't mean to open anything, it was just an option that could be installed on the power cord when the device has an exterior power supply.
In a system such as this, you don't crack open ANYTHING. You don't add a capacitor by making a male to female cable with a capacitor across it. You use the equipment out of the box, with any adjustments being only those described in the manual.
They still need to realize that this problem can't be solved if they don't spend money. I saw an APC ad from CDW last night that directly addressed this kind of problem- someone needs to contact Schneider (or someone else) to see about a quantity discount.
If they were able to add something to the DC power, a 555 timer and battery would probably be the best solution. Far less expensive than a large cap.
