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Table of Contents

1. What is power line equipment Interaction ?
2. Does equipment interaction pose a common problem?
3. What remedies are available to combat equipment interaction?

What is power line equipment Interaction ?

This is a condition that develops when some piece of equipment within a system creates sufficient transients, spikes or interference to adversely affect other system components. Often it is caused when a fairly high powered device is controlled by another device within the system. Sometimes normal operation of the higher powered system device generates sufficient electrical pollution to disrupt normal system operation.

Audio system equipment interaction is one very common example.

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Does equipment interaction pose a common problem?

Equipment interaction is quite common. Because it is somewhat difficult to diagnose, often the problem is blamed on "poor power" or a "software glitch" or some other excuse.

Often a "fix" is achieved by fooling around with power cords to various pieces of system equipment until the problem goes away. This is a form of "isolation", since moving around power cords will eventually get equipment plugged into different circuits from the building circuit breaker panel box. CAUTION !! This "fix" may be only temporary.

One common situation involves a system where several computers share a laser printer. This could be a network or a simple printer sharing configuration. Laser printers generally draw 4 to 6 amps and sometimes put a hefty transient on the local power line while cycling. This transient may be large enough to disrupt operations in some (or all) computers in the system.

Other problems may arise from heavy duty scanners, computer controlled copiers or other systems that incorporate one or more high current drawing devices.

Industrial or Laboratory environments may experience interaction problems between microprocessor controllers and heavy machinery or experimental setups.

As mentioned previously, digital Audio systems are frequently afflicted with equipment interaction problems. Power amplifiers affect the power line, which in turn adversely affect the low level devices such as CD player, tuner, equalizer, etc

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What remedies are available to combat equipment interaction?

Filter Isolator systems are employed when several elements within an operating system interact due to electrical interference created on the common AC Power line by one or more devices in the system. Note: Isolation transformers generally do not solve equipment interaction problems.

Typically a problem system might consist of one or more high power devices, several low level sensor circuits and a central processing system. Very often the entire system is powered from within a central operating equipment rack.

High performance filters placed in power lines feeding each high powered device and each low level sensor effectively isolate devices from each other and from the Power Line. As added insurance, filtering is usually inserted in the central processing system power line.

Filters and associated suppressor are incorporated within a single unit, with each filter network referred to as a filter "channel". Electronic Specialists Filter-Isolators are often configured with a single socket per channel, but models with up to 3 sockets per channel are available. Additionally, Special Designs providing any number of channels and sockets per channel can be developed.

Of course, heavy duty, multi-stage, hybrid Industrial type Spike/Surge Suppression is part of the installation directly at the point AC Power enters the system and splits off to the filters. This ensures spikes generated by high power equipment do not get passed into other system components. Spikes entering on the Power line are also suppressed.

Available models are presented in the Filter-Isolator section

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