FAQ
Aren't All surge Protectors With a UL Rating Equally Effective?
Underwriters Laboratories (UL) maintains safety standards designed to give the consumer confidence that a device (coffee maker, toaster, computer, printer, surge protector) will not electrocute anyone, or start the curtains on fire. UL does not rate the effectiveness of any device it tests, so for surge protectors, UL is not testing how effective the surge protector is a stopping surge, only that it is safe to use.
Revolutionary Bantam Technology
The technology in the Bantam series of power conditioning surge protectors was awarded US and International patents because of its novel concept and design.
The patents were awarded to a new circuit that protects sensitive electronics from power pollution in the form of surge, spikes, swells, transients, ripples, and harmonics, while providing power factor correction. This unique circuit filters and protects Line, Neutral and Ground for a complete approach to stopping harmful energy without diverting power pollution to the grounding path, unlike most of the other solutions in the market today.
Instead, harmful spikes, transient energy and harmonics are absorbed into inductors and transformed into useful energy. Today’s electronics often use ground as a voltage reference for digital components in addition to a required safety path for faults. Surges and spikes on ground will corrupt digital signals that expect a “quiet” ground for reference. To divert surge current to ground means that it has another path to travel. When current travels down a conduit or a power cord, it transfers its energy signal by magnetism onto the other nearby wires. This allows a surge current on one path to move onto others.
That problem is what makes our solution so revolutionary; the circuit pushes back on all the surge current on each path and breaks the magnetic coupling so the energy is stopped in its tracks.
Common consumer surge protectors and power filters use simple and inexpensive metal-oxide varistors (MOVs) that divert sudden surges and spikes to the ground path. This traditional technology is also sacrificial by design as the MOV can tolerate only a small number of conductive events before it becomes ineffective. Often this ineffectiveness happens during a single surge event, leaving anything supposedly protected completely exposed to harm.
Filtering of continuous power pollution is generally accomplished with additional frequency- specific power filter technology to augment the MOV surge protection. Since power filtering over a large frequency range is expensive, these traditional power filters cover a limited frequency to reduce cost.
Modern device designers understand the dangers of power pollution and will also incorporate traditional protection into their products’ circuits. The abundance of separate surge and filter products on the market attests to the lack of confidence in internal protection alone.
The single Bantam circuit provides both surge protection and power filtering. It will outperform traditional surge technologies, absorb dangerous energy and purify power at less than half the cost of any competitor’s surge protection and filter technology, within a smaller form factor.
Patents exclusively licensed to Bantam Technology
- 6,166,458,
- 6,288,917,
- 8,223,468 and
- other patents pending.