AmbergrisCaye.com Home Forums Belize Life Living in Belize No Mexican power for 4 months

Surge Protectors for all my friends ha ha.

Sorry, surge protectors do not help with low voltage and brown outs. Generators are great but the damage can be done before they kick in. During Arthur last year, there was a time that there was just enough current to run light bulbs but nothing that had a compressor. Fried a lot of expensive equipment. Low voltage is a killer. According to one of the BEL guys on the island that is in the know, Belize has enough diesel and gas turbine power to suffice. Perhaps this is just a big old media event to kill the call by the public for the rate reductions that were promised. Naw, couldn't happen.

Ya gotta learn to roll with the punches...thats the San Pedro way.

Lan, Some years ago Quebec Power (we had contracts with their hydro & nuclear plants to deliver power at x dollars to our New England grid. The price of oil went up and we thought we where all set, we had long term contracts. The problem was trying to enforce international contracts and at what cost. We where threatened to have our contracted supplies shut down. There is a lesson here. You can only really control what is within your boundaries and you should plan accordingly. I don't really recall how it was resolved but it was a wake up call at the time and caused some anguished moments of uncertain supply.

Ambergrishog Handyman Eddie told us that a line monitor (I think it was) are what we need in addition to surge protectors to really help safeguard against low voltage issue.

Do you (or anyone else) know anything about line monitors?

If theres no power,nothing will help..except maybe a generator...

we are coming the first week in july should we rethink this?

tg, I don't know what you as a end user can do on short money. That is a question I know little about. At the power plants we have trips on our generators at a certain cycles high & low. (equates to voltage) Either condition can cause problems and especially with electronic equipment like computers. Getting the proper voltage to a population area can be a complex problem. It has to do with wire size carrying power in; line voltage; megavars; distance from power source and more. I ran a plant in Boston for years and our primary purpose was to keep the voltage from sagging. (very important near financial centers with all their computers) That plant made little money on power generated and most of the time we ran at minimum load. (our purpose was voltage control) A few years ago when the infrastructure was upgraded they shut that plant down.

This is one of the problems we are going to have with solar and wind power. The infrastructure just isn't there right now and it takes years and tons of money to get it there.

A few years ago I used to see the plant in SP running a lot in the daytime. I've been told that your power comes mostly from Mexico so at the time I assumed that it was running for voltage protection. I have never talked to anyone there so I really don't know. Does the SP plant generate enough of power for the Island???

Will wait to see the validity of this press release. In the meantime, I am happy to report that Xanadu has just completed the installation of a state of the art back up generator system. This system has the capability to run the entire resort including a/c's, and full kitchen facilities in all our suites. It may be time for me to consider living on property!

This page gives a good description of different types of power protection.

http://www.alliedelectronics.com/Power-Data-Protection.html

To protect computer/networking equipment we use power conditioning UPS batteries from Oneac. IMHO, they are best.

http://www.chloridepower.com/en/USA/Products/Technologies/UPSs2/

For anything that doesn't require uninterrupted power, a UPS battery isn't necessary. For appliances and general purpose protection against surges/sags, a Transient Voltage Surge Suppressors (TVSS) should suffice. These get hooked up between the BEL meter and your breaker box.

We recently had a customer install a few of these and so far so good:

http://www.ditekcorp.com/product-details.asp?ProdKey=5

For the ultimate protection, the best thing you can have is an isolation transformer (aka power conditioner) which gets placed inline on 220v or 110v feeds to your equipment. The isolation transformer does what is says, it takes the AC from the outlet, "transforms" it to DC and back to AC - cleaning the power along the way 24x7.