3-steps to Whole-House EMP Protection

okay so let's talk about how to protect a home from an EMP or solar storm so the first part of it is you have to understand what the threat is all right and so let's say there's an EMP that occurs very high in the atmosphere or maybe a solar event some kind of coronal mass ejection that comes towards the earth its primary effect of either one of those is going to be to inject a very large amount of energy on too long conductors such as power lines now once that energy couples into those power lines it's going to flow in all directions and that means it's going to come down through the transformer system and into your home and anything that's plugged into the outlets in your home then might potentially be damaged by that very powerful surge of energy so that occurs both from a solar storm or an EMP now an EMP also has an added threat of a very high frequency component that not only couples into long conductors but also couples into small conductors such as even your cell phone or anything you know your computers those type of things and and that has to be addressed slightly differently and I'll talk about that in just a minute but so you need to understand the primary threat is the conducted energy that comes in from the power lines into your home and you'd like to address that in some way all right now if you look at the actual waveform generated by let's say an EMP it has three different components all right they call a 1 e 2 and E 3 and the e 1 event is the initial really fast surge of energy it occurs in the nanosecond kind of time frames that's very very fast the e 2 event is spread out over let's say microseconds of time and then the e 3 event is over milliseconds or even seconds or minutes so it's a very long duration type event and to have a true system that protects your home it has to address all three of those okay so let's talk about how we might do that all right so there are basically three steps to protecting your home all right I'll walk you through these and there's a lot to know about each of these but I'll do my best to just sort of give you a quick overview and you can ask questions if you have some so the first thing is you want to put a good whole house surge protection device on your home all right you usually mounts right next to the breaker box in your garage sometimes they're mounted outside but it goes it connects into your breaker panel okay so a good whole house surge protector device now what do I mean by a good whole house one what's good mean well I came up with a list of six different metrics that I think are important okay you may disagree and have other metrics but I'll talk to you about why I think these are important and this is what you should look for and in particular I'll point out one specific search protection device that I found after surveying the market that meets all of these and I think does a fantastic job all right so the first one is get one that's ul 1449 listed all right that just means it's been properly tested for safety this is hugely important because if you get one that's not ul 1449 listed it might not be might void your homeowners warranty they might claim that you put something on your home that wasn't approved okay so make sure it's ul 1449 listed it has to offer the complete protection for your home that means it has to protect line to line line the neutral line the ground and neutral the ground right it has to protect all those different sort of paths by which the current could flow all right because you don't know where the energy is coming in on it may come in on one line both lines neutral you're not sure all right so you'd like to get a surge protector device that has all of those parts of protection some some surge protection devices may only offer a portion of those so again look for that again my recommendation is to find one that offers all that protection the second is look for one that's rated with an I nominal or I sub n of 20,000 amps that's the most that ul rate a surge protection device to so look for one that has that rating that means it's it can take a repeated number of surges at that current rating and still survive okay and then next look for one that has a really large maximum possible surge current something greater than a hundred thousand amps because again we're going to get a really big bunch of current coming through this and there's another reason for this I'll talk about in just a minute so something that has greater than a hundred thousand amps of maximum surge current all right ideally I like them if they have ten gauge wire wired to them some of them come with smaller gauge wire I like the 10 gauge wire just because it's a it has more standard current capacity and and again there's a reason for that as well and I'll talk about that in a minute and then finally if it has some kind of a warning either a flashing light or an audible warning is even better in my opinion that's nice because then you know if the part has failed you don't think you're being protected and in fact it might have failed six months ago due to a lightning strike or something so have some kind of an audible warning to tell you hey the device has become faulty all right so these are the metrics I think are important if you were going to pick a surge protection device and I'm sure there are a number that meet this there's one in particular I found that's fantastic it meets all these easily and I'll talk about that after I get done talking about the general recommendations okay so those are the steps there to find a good whole house surge protection device now I mentioned that that this number four and number five there was another reason to look at those besides just surviving the event and that is because when you're looking to survive the e3 event that's a long duration search right maybe the the power lines go from their nominal 120 volts into your house maybe up to 300 volts or 350 volts you want something that can draw the current into it a surge protection device that can draw the current into it when you get over voltage like that and survive long enough that it will actually over current the breakers feeding your home and it will trip those breakers all right now the only way that happens I've done a number of tests on this the only way that happens is if you have something can take a huge amount of current right and so that's why I say the hundred thousand amps is really important you can draw a hundred thousand amps into the home very briefly and pop the upstream breakers on your home and disconnect your home from the rest of this e3 surge that might be present okay and that's really important to surviving the EMP event or a coronal mass ejection they both have that III component all right so that's important for that reason and the 10 gauge wire is the same reason is that if you have the higher gauge wire you can draw that current for longer without heating up the wire okay so that the reason these are really important in my opinion is not just to survive the e1 but to survive the e3 okay all right so a whole good whole house surge protector device will talk more about which ones I recommend in a minute the second is is a special recommendation that you won't see another places probably and that is that you need a very high frequency ferrite placed on the line one the line two and either the neutral or ground or both if you have them coming into your breaker panel alright so there are a number of ferrite sout there and they're just little while show yeoman and just a minute but they're little clamp on parts or they're little parts that you route the wire through their little towards and the idea behind them is that you put current through the wire and you generate a magnetic field through this toroid and the torrid would try and resist changes in that current the ferret tries to resist current changes and by doing that it essentially would suppress some of these Peaks alright and it also helps spread them out in time now that's fantastic and if this were a complete solution you could just put it on your home and call it a day but it really only works for these very high frequency type events so in this case it would be e1 alright so this very high frequency try it is to address a1 and what it's going to do is it's going to lower the level and it's going to spread it out in time now what does that do that enables your surge protection device to actually turn on and shunt the energy away all right now without this ferrite the surge protection device just doesn't generally have enough time to turn on and take that into it because again this might be a few nanoseconds of rise time and it's if you calculate out the times to get the energy to get to surge protector device it's already present by the time the surge protector guys can turn on so this ferrite actually stops it as it comes in the home and I'll show you how that's done in just a minute alright so a very high frequency ferrite and I put a little asterisk it has to be a very special ferrite that won't saturate all right if this was such an easy solution everybody would just put one on the way that it works is you put the ferrite around either the around the line one the line two and either the neutral or ground each one of them gets their own individual ferrite and as long as the ferrite doesn't saturate it will suppress those transients that come in on those lines okay very effective the problem is that our home draws lots and lots of current all day long and so there's current flowing through those wires all day and if you put too much current through it you generate a magnetic field in the ferrite that saturates it the flux density is sort of peaked out you can't get anymore and that means it's no longer effective alright and in fact if you run the numbers the current that you're drawing through your house every day will saturate every ferrite on the market that I know of alright so in other words the ferrite is not going to work for you if you put it on it'll just get saturated by your home current and when the pulse comes in it'll just come straight in alright so you have to modify you have to get a very special material fair idea all right I looked at might be 500 different ferrite sand narrowed down to the one that I think is the very best and then you have to modify it in a very special way to get it to do what you want it to do where it won't saturate all right again I'll talk about at the end all right so this is very important to addressee once the only way I know of really to address a one it and you do it right at the input to the house and that's the way I would recommend doing it all right finally if you have worries about let's say a very sensitive electronics in your home like computers maybe you know radios those type of things you're worried about the energy coupling into the homes wires right the actual house wires this e1 event coming into the house wires and then propagating in at those devices not coming in the power lines but actually going through the air and getting into devices that way you'd want to put small broadband ferrets on the cords to those sensitive electronics now these are easy to find that you just look for good broadband fair rights I have a number for sale on disaster preparedness finding with the right diameter where they'll clip around your power cords okay and they go run the entire power cord when you do that alright so again this is to address a1 coupling into the house wire alright so this is the overall solution I'm going to talk about some specifics in just a minute but the idea is good whole ha surge protection device that meets these requirements a very high frequency ferrite again it's tricky in its own right to get the right one and then the small broadband fare writes to address the e1 coupling into the house wires right that's the solution let's talk about the specifics okay so let's take a look at this solution when it's actually applied to your house alright so what I've done is I've drawn a breaker panel and I've drawn a power meter here now typically between the power meter and the breaker panel there are typically three wires there's a line one a line two and a combined neutral slash ground now in some cases if your meters further away or if your electrical codes a little different they may require separate neutral and grounds coming over from the power meter right so I've shown it with three wires coming in but in some cases I think it's not very common anymore but there are four wires that could come in so line one comes in attaches to one side line two comes in attaches to the other they then feed a series of breakers that are all sort of interconnected the neutral and ground can come in and attach to these little bars these little bus bars inside of them alright so I've shown like a neutral bus bar and a ground bus bar but sometimes they're one in the same alright so when you go and you have this surge protection device installed and I recommend having an electrician do that even though the work is very easy to do you just attach it to this breaker and to these bus bars it's I reckon having an electrician to it for for one for safety right you don't want to electrocute yourself and also if something were to ever happen later and somebody claimed it was because your surge protection device was improperly installed you could at least show that you had a professional put it on alright so I think that's important alright so you install a surge protection device by just attaching it up to the neutral and ground busbars and then the the breakers okay the line one line to attach to the breakers alright so easy enough to do now the ferrite s' again there are a number of different kind of ferrets you can buy of all different materials you see material code 31 and 44 and on and on you can look at all these different arrow codes and they all have different frequency characteristics but they also have different saturation characteristics but even if you buy the best one out there the material that's highest frequency and that was most unlikely to saturate it will still saturate in this application there's just too much current flowing through these wires feeding into your home that even before the EMP arrives the the part will already be saturated and so it won't affect the EMP pulse that comes in and that would be very unfortunate so what you have to do is you have to buy a very special ferrite and then you have to custom modify it alright and those would then be attached one ferrite per wire that feeds in and you'd want to do it right before it feeds into the breaker system alright so it would be essentially trying to filter anything that came in from that in the external world alright any surges that came in on those lines whether it's neutral ground or whether it's line one or line two or any combination of them it would try and suppress those all right now some people might argue well I'll just get one giant ferrite and stick it around the entire bundle of wires and for some applications that would work okay for this application however I don't think it's the best solution and the reason is that we don't really know which line is going to be injected with the most energy they may not all be symmetrical not all of them may get the same energy and that will not be suppressed by a single common ferrite all right whereas if you can get individual ferrite and if they don't saturate they will suppress any transient that comes in on any of those lines so that's the best solution if you can get them to not saturate alright so this is how its installed you get ferrite surround each of those wires and you install the surge protection device now the good news is I found a fair eye of the right material and it's a very unique material and I figured out a way to custom modify it where it will not saturate for each those plus it's actually a clamp on ferrite which is beautiful because then you don't have to remove these heavy-duty wires and kill the main power you can have the electrician install these right around the wires they just clip right around the wires right you don't have to get any you know pull them out or anything like that you just clip them right around ours and they can be equipped anywhere happen before the point where they attach to the main breaker all right so those wires will feed in there and route and you just find a spot and you have them clipped around each of those wires so again you need three ferrite so if you have three wires you need for ferrets if you have four wires right so you'd want to double check that before ordering them alright so this is the general solution I just wanted to show you how it is done and finally I'm going to talk just a little bit about my recommended surge protection device okay so we talked about what the general solution method was and how it would be installed at home let's talk about some specifics of actual components all right so I looked at I don't know twenty or so different surge protection devices on the market and I found one that I really like that meets all of the metrics I outlined earlier and that one is the Siemens first surge one four zero one forty okay the one forty is because it has a rating of a hundred and forty thousand amps max capacity now that is really high that's much higher than most surge protection devices and again the reason that's important is that it allows the product to draw a great deal of current before being damaged and the goal of that in an EMP or a solar event is to actually when the III comes in is to draw that energy in and trip the upstream breakers now I have shown in a number of experiments that that is possible to do but it's only possible to do if the product will survive long enough to draw that current in now that was one of my ideas with the EMP storm was to to put in a special circuit there that would draw that current in and trip those breakers all right now since that product is not going to go to market I looked for another solution and this is the one I think that would do that now it's not quite the EMP storm it's not a three stage product or anything like that you have to address the threat differently but it is a really really good search protection of ice with a lot of current capacity has audible warning and all those things it's ul listed it's made by a great company and so it's the one I recommend all right the Siemens FS 140 now I'm not making I could resell them as a courtesy to the customer I looked into it I can't really make any money resell them they're already resold all over the web so I recommend you get them wherever you can but I do think it's a great product all right they cost a couple hundred dollars maybe two hundred and ten dollars or something like that for the product and I think they're well worth it all right it's a very good product and because it's built in you know large quantities you end up with a really good price on it now I did take it apart and I looked at all the components in it and I did some analysis of them and that's what really convinced me that this was a great product they just have a lot of protection in this product here so I recommend it all right that's the Siemens FS 140 so that's a piece of the solution all right get a really good surge protection device put on the home if you have a different search protection device that you like and you're gonna for whatever reason you think yeah this is a great products got good ratings and and you believe in it don't pull it off and put another one on keep the one that you have or use a different one if you like this is just one I'm recommending you don't have to have this specific surge protection device for the general protection to work you just need to have one that can draw a lot of current into it okay alright the other piece that you need though for this to work and be effective is you have to address that eewan pulse and the only way I know to do that effectively is to put a ferrite on each of the incoming power wires right now that's probably three wires if your house is wired like mine is but it could be four wires so you want to take a look at that before you order them now don't just go out and buy any arbitrary ferrite or even just think you can just buy a ferrite off the shelf and it will work because it won't work if you run the analysis or you write the manufacturers they'll tell you it won't work you have to buy a special ferrite and you have to modify each ferrite has to be custom modified to be able to work for this application alright I won't go into the details of modification it's not worth the trouble unless you're an engineer it wouldn't really make a lot of sense to you but suffice it to say that if you don't get a custom modified special ferrite it will saturate and it won't do the job alright the parts themselves are pretty expensive and then they have to be specially modified so it's they're going to be rather expensive my guess is you can get three of them for I don't know a hundred and forty dollars or something like that alright if time you run the numbers of getting them modified and shipped out it's something like a hundred and forty dollars per three of them and so I'll offer the complete solution with the ferrite and the surge protection devices if you want to buy little ferrets that ESCO a lot you know on your radios and on your laptops and if those are already on disaster pair comm and there's a number of different sizes just make sure you get the right dimensional sized one that will fit around the wire bundle okay and they just clip them around the wire bundle and that helps protect against the energy that might couple into the house wires and flow up into those parts all right so that's the solution all right the particular surge protection device I like the ferrets that I'm going to offer and then if you want to get some small ferrets to put on the parts those are recommended as well alright thank you very much if you have some questions write them in the comments I know there's a lot to talk about here and I'll do my best to try and answer them

Channel: empdoctor

Views: 117,277

Rating: 4.9619341 out of 5

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Id: bPSTFe1dBAg

Length: 18min 19sec (1099 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 10 2020