Power Strips, UPS and Toschi Station

surge protectors. So today we're going to expand that request a little bit and talk about those and some circuit breakers and fuses and power strips in general, and vampire power. You know, I vant the suck your vaults. Wow. Okay, that that sounded way less wrong in my head, but

let's dive in. First, let's talk about electricity and circuits in general, including topics like voltage and current, because I find that these concepts can be pretty easy for people to mix up if they're not working with them regularly or studying physics. So we use voltage to describe the electric potential between two different points. Uh, if the electric

potential zero, if there's no difference between them. There's no voltage, there's no there to make an electric current flow between the two points, So everyone's just kind of cool and hanging out where there are. And we're gonna use water as sort of an analogy to talk about electricity quite

a bit in this episode. So in this case, imagine you've got two clear beakers of water, and these beakers have a little spigot at their base, right, So though the water level is above where the spigot is, and you've got the exact same amount of water in each speaker, they're on a level table, so they're on the exact same elevation with each other. There's no tilt or anything, and you've got a clear tube connecting the end of

one spigot to the other spigot. Well, now that we've got these two beakers their level, they have the exact same amount of water in them. If we open those spigots up, we're not going to expect to see water flow from one to the other. Right there, pretty much gonna stay in equilibrium because the water levels are the same. There's no pressure there to move the water around. Two points with zero electric potential are pretty much the same sort of thing as these two beakers. All right, but

let's say we close the spigots on each beaker. Now water is still trapped in the tube as well, it can't go anywhere. And then we lift beaker one and we placed it on top of a small stack of books, So now it's at a higher elevation compared to beaker number two. Beaker number two is still on the surface of the table. Now, if we open up the two spigots, what happens, Well, water from beaker one will start to

flow to beaker two. We will reach an equilibrium. Again, but that's not really important for our understanding of voltage. The point is, at the moment we open the figots, the water will flow from beaker one to beaker two. With voltage, a difference in potential will cause a current of electricity to flow from one point to the other. Now, because Ben Franklin made a fifty fifty shot and got it wrong, we describe current as moving from a positive

charge to a negative charge. That positive moves to negative, and we frequently describe electricity as a flow of electrons. That's being a little simplistic, but it serves our purposes. But electrons are negatively charged particles, so the electron flow goes from negative to positive. Because remember opposite charges attract and like charges repel one another. So the electrons move from a point of higher negative charge to a point

of higher positive charge. So while we describe current as positive charge moving toward negative, the actual electron flow is negative towards positive. Yes, it is confusing. No, that's not going to be the end of where things are confusing in this episode, but stick with me. It's all understandable. So the greater the difference in that negative and positive charge, the greater the voltage. And you can think of voltage

as water pressure. If we're talking about that system we were mentioning before, if we were to pour a lot more water into beaker one, filling it up all the way before we open up the spigots, you know, beager ones at that higher elevation as well, we would actually also be increasing the water pressure of the system in general, and so we would see more pressure pushing the water

through to beaker number two. We see the same sort of thing with electrical systems, and we measure this pressure or voltage in volts, so you know, that's easy, and that pressure metaphor also tells us how much work a circuit can do. You know what kind of load can you put on that circuit. Higher voltages can do harder work, and a typical double A alkaline battery can offer up one point five volts, which is a relatively small amount

In the United States. A wall outlet pushes out one twenty volts, which is why you can run heavy appliances using power from the wall, but a single double A battery just won't cut it. Current is different. Current is the rate at which electric charge flows past a specific point within a circuit. This is the rate of flow of electric charge, as opposed to voltage, which we can

think of as the energy per unit of charge. So current describes how much electricity is flowing, even though that's a little misleading, and voltage describes how much omph that electricity has. We measure current in apps. Current needs voltage to flow. If you don't have voltage, you don't have pressure, you don't have current. It would be like our two beakers that are side by side with that same level

of water. There would be no flow there either. Materials that allow current to flow more easily are called conductors, whereas materials that have high resistance to current flowing through them are insulators. Now, pretty much every thing has some level of electrical resistance, even the best conductors, at least in conditions that most of us are familiar with. Now, if you habitually cool down conductors to near absolute zero, then you might be used to working with stuff that

has no electrical resistance a k a. Super conductors. But for practical purposes, it's something we have to deal with electrical resistance, and I also have to define circuits. So a circuit is essentially a closed loop pathway that electricity can follow. If you open any of that path, if you break the line of that pathway, the electricity can no longer flow through. And it's kind of like if

you were driving along a track. Let's say it's a circular track, you know, like NASCAR racing, but part of that track is actually underwater and you can't go through that part. Well, you would start your race and then you would hit this part where the water was and you would have to pop and you couldn't actually continue. Electricity is kind of similar. It has to have that unbroken path in order for it to flow. So if you break that path, the circuit no longer allows electricity

to flow. This is the whole basis of switches, right. If you have an open switch, it means that you have a broken path and the electricity cannot flow through it. When you close the switch, you have completed that path and now electricity can flow freely. So electricity will only flow through a complete circuit. But that also means that if you come into contact with a conductor, your body could serve the same as a switch in a circuit.

You could close a circuit when you come into contact with a conductor, and electricity will always attempt to return to its source, and it will always follow the path of least resistance. In a circuit, however, it will take all available paths. So if you have let's ay you've got a pathway in your circuit, and you divided into three different lines, and you have different amounts of resistance on each line, most of the current is going to

pass through the pathway that has the least resistance. You'll still get some current going through the other pathways, but it will be significantly less. So, if you come into contact with a conductor and your body represents an area of lower resistance, you're gonna take the brunt of that electricity, and that's a that's not a good thing. I'll get back into why that's not a good thing just in

a little bit. But components in a circuit can be connected either in series, which means you have one right after the other in a sort of single pathway, or they can be connected in parallel, which means they be in side by side individual pathways. When they're connected in series, the same amount of current will flow through each component, but the voltage drops from one component to the next. In parallel, the voltage across each component will remain the same,

but the total current is divided between each pathway. So it's it's an opposite situation from the series approach. Now, when it comes to electrical shocks, amperage a gave the current is really what we need to worry about, not the voltages. You know, something we can ignore. But you know you don't want to come into contact with a high voltage line. Definitely don't do that. You should never go near high voltage lines. Take it from electric six

danger danger high voltage. But it doesn't take a very strong current to do serious damage. At around ten to twenty milla amps, and a mill amp is one of an amp. You would feel a zap of a shock. At between twenty million amps, the current is strong enough to deliver a powerful, painful shock and you lose control of your muscles. You know, our bodies communicate and operate on electrochemical signals, so electricity causes that to really go

hey wire. So at this level, if you were to grab a wire that has between twenty and seventi five milliamps a current running through it, you wouldn't be able to let go. Your hand would seize around that wire. Now, at around seventy five milliamps, your heart ventricles are affected by this. They start to twitch uncontrollably, and I mean that's seriously bad stuff. At one two d milliamps, it's incredibly dangerous and a shock is often fatal at that

amperage above two hundred bill amps. Interestingly, your body's response would be to clamp down so hard that you might actually survive that shock because your heart is unable to fibrillate to have these uncontrollable vibrations because your chest muscle squeeze so hard it prevents your heart from fit relating. However, you would also suffer really terrible burns and possibly damage to your internal organs. So while you could survive that

kind of a shock, it would really hurt you. You would be more likely to survive at that level, however, than if you were to encounter a current of between one two hundred milli apps that would be more likely to be fatal. And when we talk about electricity, we often talk about direct current versus alternating current. Direct current is the easiest for us to understand. It's very easy to draw and understand how this works. Electricity flows in

one direction only with direct current. It's like a one way street. Batteries work this way. So a battery has a negative terminal and a positive terminal, and electricity will always flow from negative to positive, whereas the current is going from positives and i aative, but we've covered that with alternating current. However, it's like you're switching which terminal is negative and which one is positive, and you're doing that many times per second. The voltage actually kind of

moves in a sort of wave. It hits the peak on one side. When terminal one is the most negative it can be. In terminal two is the most positive, it can be then it moves the other way as the two terminals switch. So remember when I said that the typical US household gets one volts delivered to outlets.

That is an alternating current. So in the US the current alternates direction sixty times per second, So every sixty seconds it goes one volts with the current flowing in one direction and flips to one volts going in the

other direction sixty times a second. Now I say all this, However, in reality, there is some variation in the amount of voltage coming to various outlets in a home, and it can vary to all sorts of stuff, like the gauge of wire that was used to wire the house, the temperature that the wires are at, the installation on the wires, the distance of the house from the transformer on the street.

But you get the general idea. And moreover, electronics manufacturers design products that can tolerate a small deviation from the standard, whatever that standard might be in that particular country, and different countries do have different standards. I'll be working with the U S standard in this episode because I live

in the US. So the electricity goes over the power grid and ultimately gets directed into your house or apartment or whatever, which represents a new circuit, which in turn is made up of smaller circuits, kind of wheels within wheels, as it were. One other thing I should mention our what's what's are a unit of power. And if you take an electrical circuit and you multiply the voltage across that circuit by the amps that are passing through the circuit,

you get watts. Watts equals volts times amps. Most of our stuff actually runs on direct current, not alternating current. So these devices that we plug into our walls typically have what is called a rectifier. Uh. And if you have devices that have a power brick, the power break is your rectifier. Typically this converts the alternating current to direct current. Usually have a much lower voltage as well.

You might wonder why we are even using alternating current anyway, since most of our stuff is running on d C power, wouldn't it make sense to just supply DC power instead of having to convert it? Well, it all comes down to transmitting electricity over great distances. More than a century ago, there was a big debate about which approach was the one to use. Thomas Edison wanted to go with direct current, which would have required building out lots of power plants

to be close to the load. That is, you would have to add power plants close to the places that were actually using the electricity coming from those power plants. Because it was really hard to send direct current of sufficient voltage longer distances. You would have to have incredibly thick cables and you would lose a lot of energy in the form of heat waste. If you were really pushing the voltage super hard, then the cables would heat up to the point where they would just break under

the stress. So alternating current, which was championed by George Westinghouse, could make use of electrical transformers, and with transformers you can step up the voltage for long distance transmission, which is much more efficient, and then you would have other transformers at the other end to step down the voltage

once it got to wherever you were sending it. A C power was more practical at the time and one out, but it did mean having to use rectifiers to change the A C T D C in order to make practical use of it. With most appliances. If you're familiar with the basics of circuits, you know about resistors, These are elements that have a specific electrical resistance, you know, a resistance to the flow of current, and they're used

to do all sorts of stuff. For example, the filament in a light bulb is essentially a resistor which resists the flow of current, and as current pushes its way through anyway due to having a sufficient amount of voltage, some of the electrical energy converts into heat, which heats up the filament and ultimately causes it to glow. Well. Essentially, all things you plug into a power outlet are acting as a type of resistor in the circuit that is

your home's wiring. The appliance represents a constant resistance. Your home is supplied with a constant voltage, so that means the current is kept constant as well. Because all of these things relate to one another. Now that's a good thing, as good old Tom Harris wrote in a house stuff works dot com article about circuit breakers. Quote, too much charge flowing through a circuit at a particular time would heat the appliances, wires, and the building's wiring two unsafe levels,

possibly causing a fire. End quote. So let's go ahead and define a power strip. Now that we've got these basics out of the way. A power strip is a bunch of outlets that are mounted into a frame of some sort. Now, while it might appear that these outlets are in a series, like if you have a long, thin powder strip, it looks like you've got a series

of outlets, they're actually wired in parallel. If you were to take one of these apart and don't do that, but if you were, you would see they're wired and parallel, not in series. And if you remember, that means the voltage is going to remain the same for every component that gets plugged into that strip. That's important because otherwise you would have a voltage drop if they were in series. As you plugged more components into the strip, the voltage

would drop further down the series. And if you've got a few components that require a hefty amount of voltage, you could find yourself out of luck. The devices wouldn't receive enough pressure to work. Now, while the voltage will remain constant across the components plugged into a power strip, and the resistance remains constant per component, adding more components means increasing the load of current moving through the power strip. So as you plug more stuff into a power strip,

the power strip has to supply more amperage. If the power requirements of the components are super hefty, it could mean overloading that specific circuit, which could lead to some of those really bad outcomes like an electrical fire. And that's where circuit breakers come in. I'll explain them more

in just a second, but first let's take a quick break. Okay, so without circuit breakers or fuses, there would be no fail safe to prevent someone from overloading a home electrical circuit and causing wires to heat up enough to melt or cause a fire. So thankfully we do have these elements to help keep us safe as we use electricity. Let's start with fuses, because they are pretty simple to understand. A fuse has a thin wire inside that's kind of

like a filament to a light bulb. Fuses are designed to handle a certain amount of current within a circuit. If the fuse receives more than that allotted amount of current based on the type of fuse you're using, then the electrical energy that's running through that thin wire will cause it to heat up rapidly and it begins to disintegrate. It burns through that cuts off the electrical circuit. We have now cut off that pathway broken it. But the bummer of the sort of approach is that when that

does happen, you have to replace the fuse. They are a one use item. Uh so they do protect your home in the case of a increase in current, which could be a real problem, but it means also that once that does happen, you have to go out and replace the fuse and the fuse box. I used to live in a house that still had a fuse box and occasionally we'd have a fuse go out and that was a real hassle. I mean, just finding the right fuse to go in the right section was was something

of a challenge at times. Circuit breakers are way easier from an end user standpoint, and it typically involves opening up a panel and flicking a switch that has been turned off to on. So when you flip the switch to on, it completes a circuit. It allows electricity to flow through, but if the current running through that circuit exceeds a certain amount, it trips the switch, so it turns off. And there's actually a couple of different ways this can be done, but one of them is using

an electro magnet. The current causes the electro magnet to generate a magnetic field, and if the current peaks, if it gets too strong, that magnetic field comes strong enough to pull a metal lever and mechanically move it to a different position, which actually causes the switch to flip off. It's the power of magnetism that pulls the switch into the off position. It's incredibly clever because that only happens if the electrical current is strong enough to create that

magnetic field in the electro magnet. So very ingenious design. Now that's a very high level look at circuit breakers. It's also not the only way that circuit breakers can work. But I want to segue over to surge protectors because that was the actual area of interest that I was asked about. So circuit breakers are all about cutting off a circuit once the current becomes too strong. Surge protectors

are about protecting against a quick increase in voltage. So this is about finding a way to deal with a sudden increase in electrical pressure. If you like surges, don't have to laugh very long before they are a problem. If you get a super fast jump and voltage that only lasts for a nanosecond or two, we call that a spike, But if it lasts three nanoseconds or more, it's a surge. But a nanosecond is one billionth of

a second. So yeah, surges can be quick, far faster than we can perceive, though we definitely can perceive the consequences of a surge. Now, if you have something plugged into an outlet and the outlet experiences a surge, it's kind of like if you were to have a water hose connected to a spigot and suddenly that spigott forces way more water through the hose than it can handle. The hose itself can burst if there's too much water

pressure inside of it. So voltage surges can cause wires to melt or make devices work way harder than they are supposed to. You know, devices are meant to work at a certain voltage. There you can in add more voltage. You could create more voltage and thus make the device work harder than it was intended, but that's not a

great idea. So, for example, the device you've got plugged into a wall has a motor in it, then the motor may suddenly operate at a speed much higher than it was meant to and this might not result in immediate failure, but it definitely adds to the wear and tear on a device. It can also be a safety issue, so you want to avoid surges. A surge protector deals with a rapid increase in voltage by directing excess current into the wall outlets. Grounding wire and a grounding wire

is kind of what it sounds like. It's a safety wire in the outlet that ultimately connects to earth. So under normal circumstances, this wire does not carry any electricity. It's it doesn't hold a current. Under normal operating conditions, it has very low resistance, but current does not flow through it. The grounding wire is there to serve as an alternate pathway for current to flow in the event

that something has gone wrong. By the way, there's also a grounded neutral conductor sometimes called a ground wire or grounded wire. So you have a grounding wire and a grounded wire, and yeah, that makes stuff gets super confusing because it's very easy to mix up grounding wire and grounded wire. So let's step back for a second, and honestly, we can get around this confusion if we just call it the neutral wire in the first place. So at bare minimum, if you want a circuit, you need two wires.

And let's just imagine a very simple circuit with a battery and a light bulb and a pair of wires. So you've got a wire that connects the negative terminal of the battery where the electrons are coming out to the bulb, and this is the hot wire. It is carrying electrons to the circuit load. The load being the component that requires electricity to work, and this example it's the bulb. The wire that connects the bulb to the

batteries positive terminal is called the neutral wire. This is how the electrons returned to the battery and complete the circuit. So if you don't have that neutral wire connecting back to the battery, you don't have a circuit. No electricity is flowing, the lamp is going to stay off. It's only when you complete the circuit by adding this neutral wire that you are going to have any light on

that that bulb. So with an outlet, the hot wire carries electricity to the load and the neutral wire carries the quote unquote used electricity back. So the neutral or grounded wire is actually carrying an electric current under normal operating conditions, unlike the grounding wire, which is a safety precaution. Now, this actually gets more complicated because in the US you actually have two hot wires coming in circuits and one neutral wire coming in, and then you have the grounding

wires all part of the outlets that you're using. But really that merits its own podcasts, so I'm not gonna go into it too much. It's all has to do with the fact that we're relying on alternating current, but it doesn't really matter for the rest of this episode. So the important thing to remember is that the grounding wire terminates ultimately in the ground itself, in the earth, and it allows the circuit to discharge excess electricity in

special circumstances. So, for example, if the hot wire in a circuit, the one that's carrying electricity to a load, were to make contact with something other than the intended load, like say the casing around a light socket, the ground wire would represent a low resistance pathway for electricity to flow back out rather than for things to start heating up and becoming a real problem, because otherwise the casing

is going to act like a resistor. So in a surge protector, you've got an element that connects the hot wire to the grounding wire. But you have to be careful about this, right. You don't want to have just a simple connection from hot wire to groundwire because then the electricity is just gonna flow straight to the ground wire. It's not gonna do any work. So one example of

this is a thing called a metal oxide verista. This is made up of a piece of metal oxide that sandwiched between two semiconductors, and the semiconductors have special properties that determine how they perform within a circuit. Semiconductors typically can act as either a conductor or an insulator depending on specific circumstances. In the case of this metal oxide verista,

we would look at the voltage. So at low voltage, the semiconductors have a very high electrical resistance, and because electricity wants to follow the path of least resistance, that electricity is just gonna keep on going past the verista. It's gonna be like not interested. But at higher the

normal voltage, the semiconductor's resistance drops dramatically. Now electricity can flow through that pathway easily because there's very low resistance, so it means current is going to pass through the hot wire, through the verista and to the grounding wire, which ultimately terminates in the ground itself, and that discharges the extract current and returns the voltage in the hot wire to normal, And so the semiconductors, once the voltage

is normal, will return to their normal resistance and electricity will follow the usual pathway. What this means for your electronics is that if there's a surge in voltage, the extra pressure gets relieved through this grounding wire and doesn't make it to the devices that you're plugged into the surge protector itself. It's kind of like a pressure relief valve in a water pressure system. Now, the metal oxide verista is just one type of surge protector. There are

lots of others, such as gas discharge arrest rs. I love the names for these. These have a gas tube that are that's filled within the inert gas and this gas can conduct electricity, but its conductivity is variable, so at low voltages it's not a very good conductor. It's

akin to having a high resistance. At higher voltages, however, the gas inside the tube begins to ionize, it begins to release some electrons, so you have some free flowing electrons in the gas that allows current to flow through the gas more readily, and so again it acts kind of like a pressure release. Both the Varista and the arrestor are based off parallel circuit designs, but you can

also have surge protectors that use series circuit designs. And if you remember, components that are connected through series have a lower voltage as you add more loads more components. These protectors don't bypass surges the way the parallel ones do. They suppress surges. Oh and and for the parallel based designs, there's another important thing to keep in mind. These protectors work by sending that excess electricity to the homes ground wire.

So home needs a grounding wire, like there needs to be a wire that actually extends down into the ground. Without that grounding wire, a surge protector wouldn't be any help because there would be no pathway to serve as that pressure release system. The US outlets that have three slots. When you see a three slot outlet in the wall, those are supposed to be grounded outlets. The D shaped rounded slot, the the hole in the bottom or sometimes the top, depending on how the outlet has been installed.

That's the one that connects to the home or buildings ground wire, or at least it's it's supposed to. Now let's talk about them buyers, or rather vampire power. So a lot of our devices don't really turn off when we turn them off, at least they don't shut down completely. So, for example, I have a computer mouse that is connected to a second computer at my desk, and that second computer is currently turned off, Yet my computer mouse has led lights that are still lit. Now there's no battery

inside my computer mouse. Clearly my computer mouse must still be drawing power from the computer, but the computers off, So what gives Well, my computer, like a lot of electronics, is actually still drawing some power even when it is turned off. Televisions tend to be the same way, printers to Really, a lot of stuff has a type of standby power mode, so that even when you shut them off, they're only what you know, Miracle Max would call mostly off,

there's still slightly on. And there are a few reasons for this, but the big one is that it's very convenient. It means the devices have a shorter startup time when we power them on. So when you grab they're clicker and turn on the old picture box, you don't want to wait for them hamsters inside to get up to run speed. I'm sorry I allowed an old prospector to write that last bit. What I meant to say is we don't really like a delay between when we turn

something on and when it's actually usable. So standby power is a kind of cheap mode to cut down on the weight times we have. So if you power something on and you're waiting for it to warm up, that's really frustrating. Standby power helps cut down in that weight time. Smart power strips are meant to detect when the device is off but attempting to draw a standby power, and these power strips cut off the source of that standby power, thus ensuring that the device is well and truly off.

It's not sipping electricity, and that means using less juice during the month, which also means a lower power bill. Is it significant Well? Estimates vary, but analysts say that stand by power consumption can make up but wween five and ten percent of a household's energy consumption, so it's definitely enough to be noticeable. It might be around a hundred bucks a year in savings, so it's it's you know,

it's not nothing. Smart power strips have some extra circuitry in them compared to your run of the mill normal power strip. They still represent a group of outlets that are mounted in parallel because you still want to make sure you're not causing a voltage drop from one device

to the next as you plug them in. But they also contain circuits that monitor a drop in power consumption, which would indicate a transition into standby power mode, and at that point, the power strip would break the circuit to the device, cutting off power. There are different ways to do this. One common one is to have a master outlet that then determines whether or not power gets supplied to some control outlets. This is easier to understand

if I actually use an example. So let's say I've got a home entertainment system and that consists of my television. I've got a surround sound system, I've got a video game console, I've got a Blu ray Player, and I've got a cable box. Now, let's say I always want

to have the cable box running. Let's say it's also my DVR and stuff, so I plug that into an outlet on my smart power strip that is always hot, meaning it's always going to have power supplied to it no matter what that outlet is, just like if I had plugged it straight into the wall. But the surround sound system, the video game console, and the Blu ray player are really only useful to me if the television is also on, So I plugged those three devices into

the control outlets in my smart power strip. The control outlets take a queue from the master outlet that's where I plug in my TV, So TV goes into the master outlet, Blu ray players, surround sound system, video game consoles into the control outlets. The circuits in the smart power strip will detect when the TV is on because they detect an increase in power consumption, So when that happens, the power strip also allows power to flow to the

devices that are plugged into the control outlets. But if I turn off my television, the drop in power consumption tells the power strip that it no longer needs to supply electricity to those control outlets. So in that case, the Blu ray player, of the surround sound system, the video game console, all go dark, they can't sip any phantom power. That makes sense, right, I mean I can't

use those devices unless the television is on. Anyway, when we come back, will transition over to uninterruptible power supplies. But first let's take another quick break. Sometimes the stuff we count on just asn't dependable. Like electricity, there are times when the power goes out. Maybe a transformer is over did which can be pretty darned spectacular, not to mention loud and dangerous. Maybe something has broken a power

line leading to your home. Whatever the root cause, the effect is the power goes out in your house, and that can potentially damage certain electronic devices if they happen to be plugged in and active at that moment, like computers, And that's where an uninterruptible power supply or UPS comes in. These are systems that are intended to supply electronic loads with sufficient power to continue operations at least for a

short while in the event of a power outage. For the type that the average person like you or me might be dealing with. It may just be something that lasts long enough for us to you know, save whatever we were doing on the computer and then shutting it down in a controlled power off cycle. It's not something that can supply power forever, but rather work as a type of stop gap while you wait for your electricity service to come back on. There are a couple of

versions of these uh. In fact, there's really three main types, but I'm really only going to cover two of them. A standby UPS is sort of UPS is just waiting in the wings, so in the event of a power outage, then it kicks on, using a rechargeable battery as the power source. These types of UPS systems typically have some sort of switch to handle the change from supplying power from the outlet to the devices to switching over to

supplying power from the onboard UPS battery. With continuous UPS devices, the stuff you plug into the UPS is always drawing power from the battery, but in turn, the battery is in a constant state of recharging, drawing power from the wall outlet. So if the power from the outlet goes out, the computer or you know, whatever you have plugged into the up US just keeps drawing power as it always

had because it's always taking power from the battery. It's only when the UPS battery itself runs out of charge that you have a problem. But again, the typical operating procedure here is to use the time that you have to take care of saving stuff and shutting down your electronics safely. Um. Granted, it's a different story if you're talking about industrial uses. In either case, the UPS has to do something really interesting and it also can seem

a little backward. Okay, remember when I said most of our devices run on direct current d C, so they have to have what's called a rectifier to convert the incoming alternating current from the wall sockets into d C power that the device can use. Well, batteries if you recall supply direct current d C power, not alternating current. However, our devices still need to accept alternating rant even though

they ultimately run on direct current. So this means the direct current from the battery in the UPS has to convert into alternating current so it can be sent onto the devices, which then use rectifiers to convert the alternating current back into direct current. What a way to run a railroad. So a rectifier takes a C turns it into d C. We call devices that do the opposite, that take DC and turn it into a C. Inverters.

So the UPS has an inverter to take the d C power out of the battery converted to a C which goes to the devices rectifier to get converted back into d C. And to make this even more complicated, rechargeable batteries need a direct current to recharge, so that means the UPS actually has its own rectifier. So the UPS has a rectifier. It takes a C coming from the wall right, the a C goes to the directive fire gets converted into d C. That DC power charges

the battery on the UPS. Then from the battery there's the inverter to convert the d C into a C. And at this point I really wish Thomas Edison could have cracked the problem of long range power transmission using direct current because it really would have simplified things a ton on the user end. Now, I like to think of rectifiers and inverters as something Luke Skywalker would really

be interested in. After all, he was really looking forward to going to Tusky Station and picking up some power converters. And if you don't get that reference, you need to watch Star Wars a New Hope. If you're shopping for UPS systems, chances are you're going to be looking at stand by UPS devices. They tend to be much less expensive than continuous UPS devices, and they work pretty well

for most of us. If you oversee something that's really mission critical, like a server room or something that's a different story. In those cases, the need for a stable source of power is enough to justify the higher cost. Your typical UPS will have some sort of way to signal that the power has switched over to the battery.

Usually it's a beeping noise, and that gives you the opportunity to get stuff you know powered down in a controlled way, and they may also require you to reset a UPS once power has been restored to the home or building. I have often worked in offices where you could hear a beeping going off and realize that someone's UPS had tripped, and you need to find which one it was and reset it, and it's a fun game

of hide and seek or lose your sanity. Now, normally I would have jumped right into history at the beginning of an episode, but I figured it would make more sense to kind of tack it on at the end of this one, to be kind of a little bit of just bonus tidbit information sort of a pub trivia kind of bit of info. So, way back in nineteen thirty two, a guy named John J. Hanley filed for a patent titled Apparatus for Maintaining an unfailing and uninterrupted

Supply of Electrical Energy. Now, I cannot say for certain he was the first person to come up with this idea. In fact, I think it's safe to say that the idea was one that was forming in a lot of places around the same time. Because we were becoming more dependent upon electricity, people saw the need for there to be some way to have a dependable source of electricity in case our primary source, the power grid, were to

become unreliable for some reason. But I can say that most sources point at Handley as being the first person to patent and approach toward creating an uninterruptible power supply.

An early paragraph in the patent states quote, A specific object of the invention is to provide apparatus for automatically changing from a condition where a given source of electrical energy is supplying an external circuit to a condition where another source of electrical energy supplies the external circuit with no interruption of electron flow in the external circuit end quote, and I think it really drives home how bizarre the

language of patents can be. Now, the intended goal of patent language is to provide a precise explanation of whatever the proposed invention is intended to do. But it can come across as very unnatural to me, kind of like a robot wrote the whole ding ding durned thing. Now you can read that patent if you like. It does describe in rather obtuse terms, the general approach Hanley was proposing.

I've talked about Hanley's described invention would switch automatically from a primary power source to a reserve power source in the event of a loss of power. The patent number, in case you are curious, is US one nine five three six zero to A and that patent expired way back in nineteen one. Patent expiration is important stuff, Like when you patent an idea, you have protection for that idea.

Really it's it's more of an invention. You have protection for that particular design of the invention and for the life of the patent. You have intellectual property ownership rights to that particular design, and if anyone wants to use your design, they have to get your permission. Typically they do that by licensing it, and then once the patent expires, anyone is free to build a device that uses that particular design or improve upon that design. It's fair game.

You don't have to pay licensing fees or anything once that expires. So and it's an important component toward innovation. Well, Nick, I hope you enjoyed that episode. It was kind of fun to dive into all things electricity once more. And like I said, there's still a whole lot I didn't cover. I really didn't want to go too deeply into the way home circuits work and those two hot wires that

come into us homes. Uh, it is a little bit more complicated, It requires a lot more discussion, and I figured that that was probably a little much for an episode about, you know, surge protectors and uninterruptible power supplies. But if you are interested in learning more about that,

let me know. Or if there's some other topic that you would like to know more about in the tech world, whether it's a company, a specific technology, a trend in tech, away that technology is affecting our lives, anything like that, let me know. You can reach out via Twitter. The handle is tech Stuff H. S W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I heart Radio product auction. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you listen to your favorite shows. H