An important warning about surge protection

Energy controllers, including our own KVEC units, utilize devices called capacitors to briefly store electrical energy (for a full explanation of how this works, click here).

For that reason, some marketers of capacitor-base energy controllers claim that they provide protection for overvoltage (power surge) events. While this is true, the protection they offer is limited to the ability of the capacitors to absorb volts. This is usually only about 10% more than the stated rating of the capacitor before they blow their internal fuses and release the energy.

Because they are not wired to ground, they cannot protect themselves – or anything else.

A typical transient voltage surge in your system can be thousands of amps.

Energy Management Partners equips our KVEC Energy Controllers with TVSS – Transient Voltage Suppression Systems – which are specifically designed and wired to automatically capture voltage spikes and route them to ground, where they are dissipated.

The TVSS units in KVEC will protect your system from surges up to 40,000 amps, depending on the size of the KVEC unit.  
So don’t put all your faith in capacitors to protect your expensive equipment from transient power surges. Capacitors are not intended to be surge protectors.