Whole House Surge Protector

While whole house surge protectors are swift in handling high current surges entering through the breaker panel of your home, you should consider that they work at higher voltages and have slower response times than say a computer surge protector.  That said, they are best for HVAC systems or large appliances like refrigerators, electric stoves and air conditioners, not computers or other electronic devices with delicate components. You should have each electronic device on its own surge protector. This includes devices that run through coaxial cables. The reason for this is a single home surge protector is made for lower current surges and is therefore faster to respond whereby a surge suppressor connected through your main breaker deals with high voltage current spikes, such as lightning strikes.

It is also important to understand that with these devices "you get what you pay for" never rang truer. Something that costs you under $60 will probably only survive a lightning strike kind of surge once and then it will be useless. In case you're wondering a whole house surge protector looks just like a circuit breaker. It connects to your current breaker board without using current breaker spots in the main panel. In other words, it is installed externally of your breaker panel.

They are rated by the amount of Joules they can absorb. Joules is a measurement for voltage. Something considered adequate for home surge protection is one with a Joules rating of 3500 and higher. A high rating can be upwards of 60,000 amps.

If you'd rather not fork out the money on a whole home surge protector then you have the option of paying monthly for a surge protection service. This is typically available through your utility provider and is either billed as a one-time charge of around $200 (the cost of a decent protector that you can install yourself) or as a service at around $5 a month. Of course it would benefit you in the long run to purchase and install a whole home surge protector yourself but the monthly service is a convenient way to get around that.

The utility company will come out and replace your meter with their surge protector unit. Your old meter is re-installed over top of that. Another benefit of subscribing to this service is that you are covered in the event that their unit malfunctions. You'll know it's working as there are two LED lights on them; one is green which means everything is A-OK, and the other is red for you know what.

Should something happen that disables the unit, your utility company is automatically notified. They will then come out and replace and leave you a courtesy note explaining what happened. This is great because you then have the option of reporting any damage to your insurance company. Usually all you need to do to file a claim is show proof that you indeed have the service provided by the utility company.

Even if your electric lines are underground you are protected if your transformers are installed above ground. That's because lightning strikes often hit the ground and thus are able to penetrate any underground feed if the strikes are close enough.

A surge protector protects against surges in electricity which include sudden spikes that can occur when power is restored due to an outage. This sudden influx of power shoots through everything in your home that was on when the power went out and gets pumped with an abundance of juice to get everything going again when power is restored. In the event of a single surge protector you will not be protected if the cause of a surge was a lightning strike. They are just not made to handle that kind of voltage.

Let me clarify this some. Now this is oversimplifying the situation a bit but your basic surge protector protects you from spikes in electricity. Lightning strikes are immense spikes. If the lightning strike hits at a distance then your basic protector can stand up against it. On the converse of that, if the strike is close by then you can forget about your device doing any good; it will get fried along with whatever else is in the path of the surge.

Several things cause large surges. Lightning is one. Power restoration after an outage is another. Both of these can destroy sensitive equipment in an instant. Now there are some folks that think that you can protect yourself by using a lightning rod, but that is wrong. Lightning rods, also called air terminals will not stop a lightning induced surge if the blast was not directly absorbed by the rod. The surge comes in through the equipment that is in the ground, i.e. underground power lines. The power line acts as a conduit and couples with the energy of the blast causing a surge.

What it boils down to is that a whole house surge protector is a worthwhile investment, but you should still consider using secondary protection against surges for your smaller devices, or rather, devices that are still affected by smaller surges, like computers.

Watch the video below to learn more about the protector.