Over the weeks, months, and years, their components will degrade, causing them to flicker. Eventually, they will turn off altogether. Your surge protector is still fine. You can replace the neon bulb. This is also true for an ordinary power strip. Some surge protectors have a switch that turns the protector on as well as a separate power light. Others combine the switch and the power light. This light serves the same purpose as a separate power switch. It tells you that the surge protector has been turned on.
If the switch uses neon bulbs , they will eventually degrade, causing the switch light to flicke r and blink before going off altogether. Most power strip lights are red or orange. This is also true for switch lights. If that red or orange light has neon bulbs, they will degrade over time. This causes them to blink and flicker. Eventually, the light will stop working. A lot of people panic when the red light on their surge protector refuses to go on.
This is especially true in situations where the light was on but then it went off and refused to turn back on. A red light is normally a power light that comes on to indicate that the surge protector has been plugged into an active outlet.
If the manufacturers of the surge protector used neon bulbs, those bulbs will degrade over time and the light will eventually go off. It should be noted that a dead red light is only innocent if it is the power or switch light. This is normally assigned to a green light. However, a manufacturer may favor a red light.
As such, if the red light is off, it means that the surge protection mechanisms have stopped working. It means that the surge protector is still functional. It all comes down to the manual. They will tell you what the red light indicates and what it means when the light goes on or off.
To understand the functions of the lights on your surge protector, you must first understand the role these devices play. Surge protectors are power strips with surge protection mechanisms.
According to Home Depot , most of them use Metal Oxide Varistors which reduce resistance in the event of a power surge. This allows the MOVs to direct destructive quantities of electricity away from the appliances connected to the surge protector. Because they are resistant to low-voltage current, MOVs do not affect the ordinary flow of electricity to your electronic devices. Every time a surge protector encounters a surge, the MOV loses its potency.
This is true for both small and large surges. Eventually, the MOV will wear out. Once this happens, y our surge protector will lose its surge protection capabilities. This can happen immediately because of one large surge or after several weeks and months because of a series of smaller surges.
This is why a flickering light on a surge protector causes so much concern. It encourages people to wonder whether their surge protector has stopped working. The components in surge protectors that prevent dangerous electrical currents from reaching your equipment are not immune to surges.
This would logically also happen when the lights are on, but you may just not notice so much with a lot of light around you, since the event is not significant at all. Think about it: If you have Neon lights, and one pops off, how long would it take you to notice?
If you have only one of those same lights, and it goes off suddenly, you're bound to see immediately: All your light is gone! The fifth is helped by the Neon lights in power strips costing a negligible amount of money, as they are the cheapest kind of Neon light ever invented.
All that said, of course, there may be a combination of several things going on. The Neon's in series with a load, such as in a wall light switch, can of course exhibit all kinds of strange behavior with capacitive loads, or inductive loads, or very light loads.
But the Neon in a power strip is directly connected to the mains through the switch, in parallel with all other loads, so that's not happening here. It might only 'spark a bit brighter or dimmer' just the once when you switch on or off a very heavy load, but that should be clear enough, in some buildings all the lights always do that.
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Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Why does a neon lamp indicator on a power strip switch flicker in the dark? Ask Question. Asked 5 years, 6 months ago. Active 11 months ago. Viewed 13k times. JRE Hamid Rohani Hamid Rohani 1 1 gold badge 4 4 silver badges 13 13 bronze badges. The ionization however can happen also due to external causes. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. I have a power strip with neon illuminated switches on each of the six outlets.
They all flicker in varying degrees, except for one. While my test wasn't extensive, my CRT was plugged into one of the flickering outlets and the image was jittery. I unplugged it and replugged it in the non-flickering outlet and the image stabilized. Could the neon bulb flicker cause the jittering image? For most electronics these don't really affect anything, but if your CRT's timing was already borderline, those tiny fluctuations may have disturbed the synchronization,, resulting in a jittery image.
Just my guess, though. The monitor I was using was a studio monitor and I had it sitting on another studio monitor. The bottom one created magnetic interference with the top one. Had a big 19" Sony Trinitron one of the 60lb beasts ; got a 17" Viewsonic, but if I put them too close together the Viewsonic's deflection plates interfered with the Trinitron's sync and made it all wobbly; since the Viewsonic was shadow mask based, it seemed much less susceptible to interference from the Sony, whereas the Trinitron was aperture grille based and seemed more susceptible to interference.
Show 1 more comment. The line voltage is not likely to fall significantly just by turning on some lights, much less a battery-powered telephone or laptop computer. Also, it is not photoionization nothing is being ionized , but rather the photoelectric effect. I don't propose anything, I'm simply quoting from the article. I would agree that the term used in the article should have been photoelectric rather than photoionisation as in a GM tube.
The current will fall to zero times per second. The discharge path changes with age and at some point the peak line voltage will no longer achieve the minimum stable current path demands. Notify me about replies to my post Post Reply. Bert Byfield Contact options for registered users. Show Quoted Text. Reply to Bert Byfield. Joseph Meehan Contact options for registered users. Reply to Joseph Meehan. PopRivet Contact options for registered users. Reply to PopRivet. Tom Baker Contact options for registered users.
Reply to Tom Baker. PrecisionMachinisT Contact options for registered users. Reply to PrecisionMachinisT. Dan Hartung Contact options for registered users. Reply to Dan Hartung. Greg Contact options for registered users. A lot of these strips use a neon light and cheap neons do flicker.
Reply to Greg. Pop Rivet Contact options for registered users. Reply to Pop Rivet. Reply to clifto. Pop Rivet accurately describes how MOV protectors must fail.
MOVs degrade as intended and as speced by charts in manufacturer data sheets. That is 'degrade' which is completely different from a catastrophic failure also known as 'vaporize'. A vaporized MOV has operated well beyond what the manufacturer requires and does not even appear on those data sheet charts. A vaporized MOV is so ineffective as to be called grossly undersized and completely ineffective. There is good reason to grossly undersized a protector. A properly sized protector with more joules will earth a surge.
Human should never know the surge even existed. In reality, protection that already exists inside appliances was not overwhelmed by the same tiny surge that catastrophically unacceptably destroyed a grossly undersized protector. With or without the adjacent protector, that appliance internal protection would never have been overwhelmed by that tiny surge. But now a misinformed human is recommending a grossly undersized and overpriced protector.
How to increase profits get the naive to recommend a product without installing sufficient MOVs. Any protector damaged by one surge was grossly undersized and should have never been purchased - too few joules. And yet that is what so many naive will recommend only because it vaporized - was grossly undersized. The only acceptable failure mode for MOVs is degradation.
Vaporization means the human bought a defective protector. Not just undersized. Grossly undersized. Too few joules. Grossly overpriced and defective. Only other part that makes a quality difference is the power strip's circuit breaker. A 15 amp breaker that has nothing to due with surges and must be provided on every power strip for human safety reasons.
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