Wayne Parham Messages: 18757 Registered: January 2001
Illuminati (33rd Degree)
What I've had the most trouble with is the output of the power converter, itself. Most of the little jobs use a switching supply that makes a nasty signal with a lot of HF spikes. It's pretty much square waves into a transformer. So the edge spikes kill the electronics. As I said, you can't even use a barrier strip on the output of one of these things if it has MOVs inside because the spikes will kill the MOVs. They try to clamp the spikes and die in the process.
The power converters don't make enough power to warrant using a barrier strip, really, but sometimes it's convenient to have just as a distribution panel. Might have the phone charger, the camera charger and a couple other doo-dads on the line, only really using light current from the supply. So it's convenient to have a barrier strip rather than to have to plug and unplug every time you want to change devices. But again, make sure the barrier strip doesn't have surge-protection built-in, 'cause it will smoke the MOVs - which fail shorted - taking out your power converter in the process.