Phantom blown up

[Hifi_swlon]

I am no electrical engineer, but I can't help thinking that a simple internal fuse in the right place would prevent any serious damage occurring. Whilst the breakers in the house tripped when the Phantoms went pop, the fuses in the plugs supplied by Devialet were unharmed.

This may seem pretty counter intuitive but in the uk at least, the fuse in the plug is there solely to protect the power cord. Yes, I was so surprised when i read posts by an electrician and electrical eng about this that I checked the regs and it’s true. The device should protect itself and in the event of catastrophic failure the plug fuse stops the cord melting/catching fire. The plugs fuse relates to how much current the cord can handle, not the device. I think a lot of people will be surprised by this.

You’d very much hope the RCD would trip before the power cord fuse blew. Yes, the Phantom itself should have some sort of internal protection, but clearly this either doesn’t exist, failed, or didn’t blow/trip quickly enough - which could happen in catastrophic failure or no doubt numerous other conditions.
No idea what internal protection Pantoms have btw, but presumably they need to allow a lot of power through and so can’t be set too conservatively otherwise they’d blow all the time.

Thank goodness things have evolved so we have multiple levels of fail-safe.