Protection that consumes itself.
Nearly every surge protector sold today works by being destroyed a little at a time. The parts that absorb the surge are the parts the surge spends. They wear with every event, they never announce the moment they stop protecting, and the day they quit, nothing about the product looks any different.
It comes down to where the part sits, and what the job costs it.
A conventional protector puts a clamping device in parallel across the conductors and waits. Bantam puts a tuned inductor in series, in the path, always working. One design is spent by absorbing energy. The other is not.
Nothing waits for a threshold
An inductor has no trigger voltage. It opposes a change in current the instant the change begins, so it is already working while a threshold device is still doing nothing.
Nothing is dumped to ground
Series inductors absorb the event in the path instead of steering it onto the ground reference your electronics depend on.
Nothing quietly expires
The element that conditions your power is not consumed by doing its job. There is no wear curve running underneath your protection, and no day when it silently ends.
A threshold device arrives late, then hammers the load.
Conventional protection relies on a voltage-threshold device wired in parallel across the conductors it protects. It does nothing at all until voltage climbs above its clamp level, typically around 360 volts on a standard 120-volt circuit. By the time it reacts, a large share of the surge has already passed through the circuit unchecked.
When it finally clamps, the act of clamping drops the voltage below the threshold, so the device immediately releases. Voltage climbs again. It clamps again. This clamp-and-release oscillation continues for the duration of the surge, delivering the full energy of the event to the load in repeated bursts.
Each cycle takes something from the part that will never come back. The degradation is cumulative, invisible, and silent, and nothing on the product changes to tell you it has happened. At the end of that curve, the equipment plugged into it is connected to what is functionally an unprotected power strip.
There is a further consequence most manufacturers do not address. To clamp at all, the energy has to be sent somewhere, and where it goes is the ground path. Modern digital electronics use that ground conductor as a stable zero-volt reference, the baseline that lets a processor tell a one from a zero. A protector that dumps energy to ground corrupts that reference, causing data errors, instability, and unexplained failures in the very equipment it claims to protect.
One surge. Two very different things reach the load.
Same incoming transient, two circuits. Switch between them and watch what the connected equipment actually sees.
Voltage climbs past the clamp threshold before the device reacts, then clamps and releases in bursts that reach the load. Every cycle ages the part, with no indicator when it finally dies.
Inductors in series, first in the path, always absorbing.
Bantam's patented circuit places tuned inductors in series on all three conductors: Line, Neutral, and Ground. Because they are in series, they are in the path the instant a surge arrives. An inductor has no threshold. It responds to the rate of change of current immediately, presenting a magnetic impedance that grows with the surge, absorbing and storing the energy at inception, stretching the event in time and cutting its peak before it travels further.
The inductors also limit how fast voltage can recover, so the destructive clamp-release-clamp oscillation never develops. The load never experiences the burst pattern. And here is the part that matters most over the life of the product: conditioning your power does not consume the element that does the conditioning. An inductor is not spent by opposing a change in current. It does the same thing on the last day of its service life that it did on the first.
The energy the inductors absorb is not thrown at your ground conductor. It is released at the load's natural consumption rate, converted from a destructive high-frequency transient into useful fundamental-frequency energy, or dissipated as heat within the circuit.
Series, not parallel. That is the entire argument.
Position decides everything. A part placed in parallel can only wait, then divert. A part placed in series is in the path from the first instant, on every conductor, in both directions.
12,019,751 · 12,271,477
Simplified topology. A tuned inductor sits in series on all three conductors, always energized, always absorbing, and each works in both directions.
Clean power, arriving at its own pace.
Your equipment sees clean power. Ground stays stable. The reference signal your digital electronics depend on is never disturbed, and the protection you paid for is still doing its job years from now, because doing its job was never what wore it out.
Continue the case: The ground path problem →
