The employees at Dehn are on a mission to make the satisfaction of our customers the focus of all of our activities. We like to work with our customers, evaluating their requirements so that we can develop and improve our products to match their needs. This allows us at Dehn to constantly work on our standards of quality to keep up with not only the demands of customers now, but also to anticipate the demands of the future. We strive to use the most modern production methods, and employ a motivated staff in order to provide the highest caliber work on these new developments. We fabricate products that are the latest in state of the art production, and meet the highest requirements of our customers.

We also strive to continue our education, working to continue developing our theoretical and practical competence, as well as our ability and know how. By continuing our education, we are able to dedicate ourselves to the requirements that our customers put out, even finding individual solutions that match the needs of different companies. Our top-quality products are also listed at competitive prices.

Besides providing reliable service and items for our customers, we also work to protect our customers, as it is our business objective. We strive to protect our customers and their property from threats and harmful influences of lightning electricity, and also protect against the risk of working with electrical currents. Safety for both the goods and chattels of our customers is our premise, so we keep up with quality management certifications, including the Quality Management DIN EN ISO 9001, which provides a yearly examination and a complete re-audit every three years to determine our company is keeping up with quality management.

If you have read our previous blogs, you realize the importance of surge protection in a variety of everyday applications within your business or industry. But these just touch the surface of the places in which surge protection is necessary. Surge protection is also important when it comes to frequency converters. Frequency converters consist of a d.c. link converter, an inverter, and the control electronics for the system.

The main issue these frequency converters face when it comes to surge protection is that the capacitors in the d.c. link converter and the LC networks are connected to the earth in the a.c. line filter. This can cause problems with residual current devices connected to the series when surge arresters are applied incorrectly. Short-term induction of fault currents can occur, activating sensitive earth leakage circuit breakers. Dehn has the remedy, though. A surge-proof RCD circuit breaker that meets the specifications of your system can often do the trick to protect your frequency converter from any electrical surges.

In order to pick the correct surge arrester for your frequency converter, you have to take the maximum continuous operating voltage into account, which specifics the maximum permissible operation voltage a surge protective device may be connected to. Because of this, those devices with higher maximum continuous operating voltage are used tat the output side of the frequency converter, in order to avoid faster aging due to the heating of the surge protective device under both normal operating conditions and the consequential voltage peaks. Heating of the system can lead to a shorter service life of the surge arrester, and inevitably a disconnection of the surge protective device from the system it is supposed to be protecting. To learn more about choosing the correct surge protection for your frequency converter, check out the 9.1 chapter of our Lightning Protection Guide, “Surge Protection for Frequency Converters”.

Lightning can look both gorgeous and deadly as it streaks through the sky during a storm. But what is it really, and what can it do? Lightning is a giant discharge of electricity, and it is accompanied by a flash of light and a crack of thunder. It can be over five miles in length, and reach temperatures of up to 50,000 degrees. While it is usually associated with thunderstorms, it is not a limited phenomena, and can be seen during extremely intense forest fires, surface nuclear detonations, and during extreme weather like heavy snowstorms and in large hurricanes.

What is concerning about lightning when it comes to your electronic devices is the fact that besides the heat, it also can contain a hundred million electrical volts. Enormous charge differences can be caused by ice in clouds, as positively charged ice crystals rise to the top of the thunderstorm and the negatively charged ice particles and hailstones drop to the lower part of the storm. The negatively charged bottom part of the storm sends an invisible charge to the ground, which attracts all positively charged objects, creating an electronic transfer channel and then lightning.

While surge protectors do not protect against direct lightning strikes, they can help make sure that property, like electronic equipment, isn’t damaged by the typical lightning storm. Besides from direct strikes, lightning can easily enter the home or office via wires or pipes that extend from outside the structure into the ground. Once the lightning is within the home, it can travel through the electrical, plumbing, phone, and radio or television reception systems easily. These surges in electrical activity translate into spikes in the voltage within the electrical lines. The increase in voltage above an appliance’s normal operating voltage can cause an arc of electrical current within the appliance, generating heat. The generated heat then causes damage to the electronic circuit boards and other electrical components.

So make sure that you have protection on all incoming electrical devices, as well as protection on phone lines and cable TV lines, and point-of-use surge protection on sensitive and expensive appliances.

While most people think about agriculture, they think about the old days with hand planting and plows that are pulled by animals. But now, modern agriculture includes many modern amenities that need lightning and surge protection, just like any other business. From automatic feeding and milking systems to heating systems for the water supply and ventilation and flushing systems, all are subject to electrical surges and need the proper protection to ensure that they are able to work properly. The complex electrical and data processing systems used in modern agriculture are automated, and therefore controlled and monitored by computers.

An example of a modern agricultural system with a high degree of automation and therefore need for surge protection is the keeping of cattle, which uses all of the technical implementations listed above. The importance of surge protection in these cases is apparent, as the failure of a system due to a lightning strike or surge could result in an impairment of the animals’ health, downtime of the systems, production losses, additional costs of medical care for animals, high expenditure on data reconstruction and expenses for the repair of the faulty device as well as the time required by it. For real life examples of situations that have occurred due to lightning damage in agricultural plants, you can read our chapter 9.6 “Lighting and Surge Protection in Modern Agriculture” located online and in our Lightning Protection Guide. From these examples, you will learn just how important the protection is. Extensive protection requires the use of components for electrical engineering in conjunction with information technology. For an effective system, the power supply side should use protective devices arranged in a decentralized manner by means of combined lightning current and surge arresters.

When was the first time you saw a surge protector advertised as a “must-have” item? Back when electrical systems became integral parts of the home some 50 years ago, barely anyone talked about electrical power surges. But they still existed. As years have progressed, a lot of the components in sophisticated modern electronic devices, like computers, microwaves, and DVD players, have become smaller and more delicate than the electronics of the past. On a small level, it is important to use surge protection for items like your computer, as it is filled with voltage-sensitive components that a power surge could very easily damage, shortening the life of the computer or even wiping out all the saved data and destroying the system. Other high-end electronic equipment like entertainment center components should also be hooked up to surge protectors, as it will help to extend the life of the devices. Items like lights don’t necessarily need to be plugged into surge protectors, as the worst that will likely happen during a power surge is the bulb in the light will blow out.

This is the same principle for larger systems. Although entire buildings, with their camera systems or intercom systems, seem daunting they are actually made up of many small components which are as susceptible to damage as a home computer – and sometimes even more so, as one small problem could trigger issues throughout the whole system. Dehn works to protect these systems from both electrical surges as well as lightning protection by coming up with many innovative products and services. We offer a wide variety of lightning and surge protection products for low and medium voltage systems, which are perfect for AC and DC power systems, automation and control circuits, RF antennas, Ethernet, telephone, and coax cables. We also create specialty products for specific applications with PV and solar power systems as well as those that rely on wind energy.

So make sure to protect your delicate electronic equipment, both small and large. Browse our product selection or call us today to find out more about what we can do for your surge protection and lightning protection needs.