Your power cord is a transformer nobody designed.
Three copper conductors, bound together in parallel inside one jacket. That is not just how a cord is made. It is how a transformer is made. Energy on any one of those conductors appears on the other two, and no amount of clamping on Line and Neutral will stop it.
Inductive coupling inside the jacket:
a transformer nobody designed
Current on one wire becomes voltage on its neighbors.
When a surge or a fast transient races down the Line conductor, it builds and collapses a magnetic field around itself. That field does not stop at the insulation. It cuts straight through the Neutral and Ground conductors running alongside, and a voltage appears on wires that were never struck.
The faster the current changes, the larger the induced voltage. Surges and switching transients are defined by how abruptly they rise, which is exactly the condition that makes coupling worst. This is mutual inductance, the same principle that makes a transformer work. In a power cord it is not a feature. It is a leak.
Clamp the Line and Neutral conductors and you have addressed two of the three paths. The third one is still bound in the jacket alongside them, still linked by the same magnetic field, still free to carry whatever the other two hand it.
Watch a problem change its identity.
Inject an event on one pair of conductors and see where the energy actually ends up. Then place a magnetic decoupler in the path.
Injected event
Path
Relative energy reaching the equipment, shown for illustration. Not measured test data.
A protector that only speaks one language cannot help you.
Filters are built for a mode. A normal mode filter expects a disturbance between Line and Neutral. A common mode filter expects one riding all three conductors together. Inductive coupling turns each into the other, which means a device tuned for one is handed a problem it was never designed to see.
Normal mode
CONVERSION DECOUPLED
BY BANTAM
Common mode
Bantam Clean Power is a magnetic decoupler.
A series inductor sits on every conductor, Ground included. Series inductance limits how fast current can change on each path, so there is little changing field left to couple. Whatever does couple meets an inductor of its own.
The conductors are decoupled from one another as energy passes through the device. A normal mode problem cannot become a common mode problem, and a common mode problem cannot become a normal mode one. Nothing is moved from one mode to another. It is impeded everywhere at once, in both directions.
Every conductor, not two of three
Ground is filtered exactly the way Line and Neutral are. There is no untouched path left in the jacket for energy to slip onto.
Both directions, always
Disturbances arriving from the utility and disturbances generated by your own equipment meet the same series impedance on the way through.
Nothing is diverted
Energy is not steered onto another conductor or dumped onto the ground reference. It is impeded in place.
Nothing to wear out
An inductor is not consumed by doing its job. The protection you buy on day one is the protection you have on day one thousand.
Protection that cannot be traded between conductors.
Decoupling is one reason the same protection is still there years later. Endurance is the other.
Proven to last