The problem that started everything

By the early 1990s, electronics were quietly undergoing a revolution that most of the power protection industry missed.

The old workhorses — motors, analog amplifiers, CRT displays — drew power in a way that was forgiving of voltage-based protection. Isolation transformers and simple filters were well-matched to that world. But a new class of power supply was rapidly displacing them: the switched-mode power supply, or SMPS. Computers, servers, digital audio equipment, POS terminals, industrial controllers — virtually every modern device now runs on SMPS technology.

The difference matters enormously for power protection. Unlike their predecessors, switched-mode power supplies are inherently current-sensitive, not voltage-sensitive. The transients and surges that damage them travel as current events, not voltage events. The protection technologies built for the previous generation — including most of what the industry still sells today — were simply the wrong tool for the job. They addressed voltage. The threat had moved to current.

There was a second problem, equally serious and even more overlooked: the ground path. Modern electronics rely on the ground wire as a stable zero-volt reference for digital circuits — the quiet baseline that lets a processor distinguish a one from a zero. Every conventional surge protector diverts harmful energy toward ground, directly corrupting the very reference signal that digital electronics depend on. Protecting Line and Neutral while poisoning Ground was not protection. It was misdirection.

In 1996, our engineers set out to solve both problems simultaneously. The result was the Leveler Technology: a patented circuit based on selective inductance applied to all three input paths — Line, Neutral, and Ground — combined with magnetic decoupling between wires that run in close proximity. By introducing the right inductance on each path and simultaneously preventing energy from coupling inductively between adjacent wires, the circuit absorbs and reshapes harmful current transients without diverting them anywhere. There is no sacrificial component. There is no ground dump. There is no reaction delay, because the circuit is always energized and works at the inception of a surge, not after it arrives.

The first patent was granted in 2000. Two more followed. The core insight — that effective power protection for modern electronics must be current-mode, all-path, and non-sacrificial — remains as true today as it was when we first proved it in the lab.