Protection on day one. Protection on day one thousand.
The same circuit, delivering the same result. Conventional protectors are spent by the act of protecting, a little at a time, until nothing is left and nothing says so. Bantam conditions your power with tuned inductors in series, and opposing a change in current does not consume an inductor. The element doing the work is unchanged by the work.
A conventional protector is built to be used up.
In a conventional surge protector, a sacrificial clamping device is the primary defense. Every time a surge arrives, that device absorbs a portion of the energy in the act of clamping, and the energy dissipated inside it changes the material of the part itself, raising its clamping voltage, reducing its energy-handling capacity, and narrowing the margin before it fails.
This degradation is cumulative, and it is completely invisible. No indicator changes. No alarm sounds. The protector looks and functions identically whether it is new or whether years of events have worn it down. The user has no way to know.
The result: a large share of the surge protectors in service today, in homes, offices, server rooms, and network closets, have degraded to the point where they provide no meaningful protection. They are unprotected power strips with indicator lights.
The work does not consume the thing doing the work.
Bantam conditions power with tuned inductors in series on every conductor. Protection is a property of how they are built, not a quantity they spend.
An inductor is not consumed by absorbing
Series inductors are passive magnetic components. Their protection, presenting impedance to any change in current, is a property of construction: turns, core material, permeability. The field expands, stores the energy, releases it, and the inductor returns to baseline. Nothing about it is different afterward.
Protection does not depend on a part being spent
The conditioning element sits in series, in the path, from the first instant of an event. It is not a reserve that drains down with use, so there is no wear curve running quietly beneath your protection and no day on which it ends without telling you.
Bantam's inductors are wound on powdered-iron cores manufactured to high Oersted ratings, chosen specifically to avoid magnetic saturation under the rated current and transient conditions of the circuit. They hold full magnetic flux density across their operating range, which is why they keep absorbing transients across the product's service life.
24 hours. 6,000 volts. 3,000 amps.
In 2001, during the original UL 1449 Second Edition certification of this circuit, a UL Adjunct endurance test drove a 6,000-volt, 3,000-amp surge into a unit built on it every 45 seconds for 24 continuous hours, while it powered a live electronic load. Replay the run.
Ready to replay. Press start to step through 1,920 surge events across the 24-hour run.
This scoreboard replays a recorded outcome. It is a depiction, not live measurement. The Bantam bar reflects the result of the 2001 UL Adjunct endurance test described above. The comparison curve is illustrative of how a sacrificial design fades over the same exposure, and is not measured data. Independent reports and white papers covering Bantam performance are available to customers on request.
At the conclusion of the test, both the unit and the attached equipment were fully operational, with no measurable degradation in protection performance. That is more than 1,900 surge events at a waveform specification exceeding the most demanding commercial surge environments.
For scale: the measured limiting voltage test that UL 1449 Second Edition itself required was a 6,000-volt, 500-amp waveform. The adjunct endurance test drove 6,000 volts at 3,000 amps, six times that current, and it did so 1,920 times in a row. These are two different tests measuring different things, and the point is not that one replaces the other. The point is the order of magnitude the circuit absorbed, repeatedly, without changing.
The test is a quarter century old, and that is the point worth sitting with. The circuit proven in 2001 is the circuit Bantam builds on today, because nothing about it needed to change. Protection that is not consumed by protecting does not have a service life to argue about.
UL 1449 has been revised through several editions since 2001. The result above describes the circuit's original Second Edition certification and the endurance testing performed alongside it. It is not a statement of current listing status. Bantam Vanguard is listed to UL 1449 Fourth Edition by MET Laboratories under file number E112870, updated in 2023. Certification status for other Bantam products is stated on each product's page.
12,019,751 · 12,271,477
Install it once. Forget it's there.
Bantam protects the same on event one as on event 1,900, with no reserve to deplete, no replacement schedule, and no silent end of life. The protection you buy is the protection you keep.
