I've looked at surge protective devices in the past before and they were quite interesting. These are from eBay and they were actually described as returns item to a major online retailer I'm guessing maybe that was perhaps Amazon although I could be wrong, but uh, they've obviously been recalled from that retailer and then they've been dumped on eBay and it says make the quality more perfect in the box and they have not made the quality more perfect. So let me explain how these work. You clip the unit into a DIN rail onto the DIN rail in your electrical distribution equipment.

you put your live in here if you're in a country with more than one Uh phase, then you put each phase into a separate unit and then there is an earth connection or a ground connection here and an event of a huge high voltage electrical. Spike See a lightning strike or electrical interference, transients, inductive loads. This component inside will go from a high resistance state to a low resistance state that will just clip it and it will protect your electrical equipment. But in doing so over time these degrade and you know, if you're in a non-electrically noisy environment, if you're you're sort of.

you've got other suppression as well. It may be this will last forever effectively, but we've got a lot of electrical spikes occurring. It will gradually degrade each time until it starts gradually starts to conduct and it starts heating up. And that's a sort of end of life statement.

Here's what should happen when it heats up. Let me just bring in a picture to explain that. I Shall Focus down onto that for extra clarity. So here's the inside of the device and buried under this resin is the surge protecting device.

So one connection goes into one side and the other connection comes out is this tab with a low melting temperature, soldering and a little spring-loaded uh, pivot pulls down in this so that when that starts heating up, theoretically it will melt the soldering. When it does, it breaks the circuit down to the other end. and also this little flag goes down to show that it's tripped. However, there's also another little tab here that looks as though it's sized for a micro switch.

maybe in more specialist equipment or there is a whole fret here, but it would have to be a very small contact. But I think that's for possibly an auxiliary contact to remotely display that Uh Something's tripped inside. However, there is a problem with this. Let me show you what happens when this one trips.

I'll zoom in again and you can see that this one has the weed green window there. Let me just focus down that so you can see it's green. Which means that is good. It's operating.

However, when it trips, let me find something to trip it with. here. a pair of long nose pliers when it trips. I Shall just try and do that.

No, uh, lift this up and trip it so it's tripped down now. even though it's not peeled that connection out and instead of going red, it stayed green. And the reason for that is because this is a bad batch. This whole top window is supposed to be printed red, but they've actually just printed a red lane it.

So this could be in this situation and uh in its latch State it's displaying green but also in its unlatched state, it's also displaying green and it would indicate that you know it was good. When it's not, when it's actually the protection has been lost. I Tested one of these at work. Let me show you that video because I took a soldier and just touched this to see the mechanism operating properly.

Let's take a look at that video right now. Uh, it's left, it bridged again. it's left a slight Bridge of soda across that. so as you saw in that video it tripped but the little air Link at the top it seemed to drag a little whisker of the solder down with it which would have kept the circuit going I'm not sure what have happened if that got hotter and hotter.

maybe it would have eventually broken circuit. Not sure but um that also happened the last time I Tested one when I bought one as a as a new item that did of the proper flag. So it makes you realize that you know a lot of stuff that is being sold online from uh certain stores may actually be dangerously non-compliant of being dumped on the internet as happens. But there we go.

I Do recommend that if you ever install a surge protective device that because these can fail potentially in Flames I do kind of recommend that you mount in a separate metal enclosure and preferably with over current protection. I Do see items being sold by compliant sellers that claim not to need a circuit breaker in series I'm not totally convinced about that. Um, but there we have it. the surge protected devices from the Dumpster of the World eBay An excellent result.