prk@charm.UUCP (Paul Kolodner) (09/02/85)
I'd like to put in my 20 millidollars on the subject of timers for electronic equipment. I've had a lot of experience with mechanical timers of the type one often sees hanging on electrical outlets in people's homes to turn on lights to scare off burglars. They are noisy (acoustically) to the point of distraction, and they are mechanically unreliable. Industrial types do not have this problem, in my limited experience; they are sold by electrical supply stores and by electronics distributors such as Newark electronics in NJ. Electronic timers do use triacs or SCR's to switch, and these can be electrically noisy, but that ought to be easy to remedy with a capacitor or two, since the noise is a short transient and line frequency is low. In fact, a simple but expensive way to do it would be to buy a transient suppressor. Now that I'm awake, a simple way to do that is to buy a "line filter" from Radio Shack for a few bucks. Put it in after the timer. It probably has a 50% chance of being able to remove transients injected on the line by a triac switch. There. Good luck.