On 9/24/2013 1:23 PM, Cortland Richmond wrote:
We used to say "UL Approved" though there are now a number of NRTL's
whose mark is accepted by the various jurisdictions who have
electrical and fire safety regulations.
Agreed on all counts with your post. And it's important to understand
that neither UL nor other NRTLs test for the EFFECTIVENESS of a product.
Rather, they test ONLY for safety issues.
Another point (or four). A major reason that electronic trash is
radiated as a common mode signal on power wiring is improper design and
construction of circuit "grounds" and their connections to external wiring.
The most common example is a green wire (and/or circuit common) that is
not properly bonded to the chassis, sort of the power system equivalent
of The Pin One Problem." How does this happen? The green wire is
bonded to circuit common but not the chassis, perhaps due to paint in
the way between that bond and the chassis. This is VERY common. In this
example, the Green Wire is hot with trash, and if you don't choke it, it
radiates.
This is why good, well designed line filters (Corcom, Delta, etc.) don't
work on common mode trash. Ah, you say, the data sheet shows strong
common mode suppression, and there's a nice graph. But the problem is,
that the power-systems definition of common mode is voltage between
neutral and ground, and that's not the correct definition. Yes, those
filters do what they say they do when installed inside equipment, and
when that equipment is properly built. But they won't do anything to
suppress common mode current (or current on the green wire) because the
green wire goes right through them unfiltered.
Before I figured this out, I crammed big Corcom and/or Delta line
filters into electrical boxes for use on the output of Honda 2000i
generators on Field Day and California QSO Party county expeditions.
They did NOTHING to the noise, which could be fairly strong above about
5 MHz. It took 4-5 turns through a big #31 clamp-on (the biggest one
Fair-Rite makes) or an equivalent number of toroids to suppress the noise.
As to building your own filter from component values -- in addition to
the very important safety and liability issues you've raised, there's
also the matter of voltage ratings for capacitors used in these filters.
By code, they must be rated for 3-6kV voltage spikes that often occur on
power wiring. There's a discussion of this in my RFI tutorial. And in
one of Henry Ott's workshops, I learned that an important element of
differential mode filtering (that isn't on the schematic) was the
interaction of the leakage inductance of the choke with the capacitance
that is between line and neutral!
73, Jim K9YC
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