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Ask Slashdot: Best Option For Heavy-Duty, Full-Home Surge Protection?
First time accepted submitter kmoser writes "Like most people, I have a couple of surge protectors for sensitive/important electronics, and even a UPS for a couple of items like computers. But I don't have surge protector on all outlets, and these consumer-grade devices don't cover things like 220 volt appliances. Add to that the fact that I live in a lightning-prone area and it's only a matter of time before one of my expensive devices has a major meltdown. I've looked into full-home surge protectors that install next to the fuse box but the prices vary widely and I have no idea how reliable they are or what brands are good. An electrician friend tells me they can still blow out, and when they do they're difficult to replace if they were installed behind a wall. Can anybody shed some light on the best options for protecting all the electronics in my house with a single surge protector?"
So here is a non answer to your question: Just replace stuff when they break Put your surge protectors next to the expensive stuff and gets some insurance. Replace things when they break. Unless your dealing with medical equipment or servers don't bother with some expensive custom solution.
The cost of a whole home UPS/surge protectors is going to be rather more than the equipment it protects. Protect sensitive electronics. If you are rural consider burying the electrical lines from property line to the house.
Now that was a stereotypical, un-thinking, useless slashdot answer, designed to appeal to the like-minded, rather than actually help the guy with his issue. The guy asks a specific question, expecting a specific answer, and all you can come up with is "why bother".
Repeat after me, un-thinking slashdot masses: "why bother" is not a valid answer on Ask Slashdot.
They get installed inline with the main house circuit breaker panel. Expensive.
Most people budget for the $$$ for the device. Then they forget the labor to do it right, and always forget to spend the $$$ for a good ground connection.
As he lives in a lightning-prone area he'll need to protect every line into the house, TV antenna, cable, telephone etc. Only protecting the power line is not enough. Up the $$$ budget some more.
You may as well save your money because that $200 whole house surge protector isn't going to protect you from a lightning strike any better than a good quality surge protecting power strip.
Just use surge protectors where needed that have an equipment replacement guarantee - and make sure you're protecting phone lines, TV cables, etc too, not just power.
If you have something truly expensive to protect, use an online ups (not line interactive) for more isolation - a lightning strike might take out your UPS, but is less likely to reach your computer (but if it's a nearby strike, all bets are off since even your ground can be a path for a power surge).
Or, just throw caution to the wind - I spent 10 years in a lightning prone area, and never used a surge protector at all -- lightning made the lights flicker many times, but I never lost a computer, TV, or stereo (or any other device) to a lightning strike. On the other hand, I saw the aftermath of a nearby strike on a friends house - lightning hit a nearby power pole, and he said he saw sparks shooting from his outlets. He did lose his TV and stereo (which were both plugged in but powered off by a physical switch at the time).
Effective lightning protection is layered. One of the best things you can do to stop errant radio waves from messing with you is to build a Faraday cage around your house. That will provide an effective defense against lightning strikes from outside the home.
However, this won't protect you from lightning strikes that occur INSIDE the Faraday cage. To defend against that, you need to not only have everything inside a Faraday cage, with a household surge suppressor, you also need to have a separate Faraday cage around every electronic device in the home, each with its own surge suppressor. It may seem a bit awkward, having to crawl inside a cage to watch TV or play computer, but it's worth it!
That way, when the aliens attack with their pulse EMP weapons, you will be blithely unaffected and will be able to sell your stereo on Ebay when everybody else's has been blown to 5h17.
Seriously, why is this important? If you care about your device, get a $10 surge suppressing power strip and call it good. I've already had several devices saved by such devices, when my parent's house was hit by lightning, it blew out their TV/VCR, microwave, telephone, and just about everything else in the house, except for the computer that I'd insisted they buy a SS power strip for.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Years ago I had a lightening strike on the cable TV lead in. It melted about 60 feet of insulation and left the carbon core of the cable hanging naked. Oddly it didn't hurt the cable box or TV at all but somehow went down the electrical wire and knocked out the circuit breaker for the how water heater. Lightning is weird and it is very difficult to predict what may be harmed by a strike.
Ground spikes are standard procedure and have been part of building code for decades.
If you can't find an electrician to do it for you, it's not that difficult to do it yourself. Get 2 ea. 6' copper ground spikes from your local hardware or electrical supply store, and pound them in with a sledgehammer. Careful not to bend them too much in the process. They aren't iron.
Then a little bit of bare copper ground line, maybe around 3 to 4 gauge, to each spike.
It's not a difficult job at all unless your house was built on top of a giant rock. I suspect that the real issue was not the ground spike, but running the rest of the ground wires through existing walls. That is the kind of job that no electrician likes to do. When I was looking to buy a home I passed up an otherwise great price on a nice house for exactly the same reason.
Sure, I could have taken the money saved and upgraded the wiring, but it would have been so much of a pain, and caused so much temporary destruction to the interior, I decided it wasn't worth the trouble.
You don't install surge protectors to defend against a direct lightning strike --- there is no real defense against a direct lightning strike - you can make it less likely with a well-engineered lightning rod protection system.
You install surge protectors to defend against currents induced by nearby lightning in your wiring. This is protection against damage lightning can cause without actually striking your wiring, or your building. If lightning strikes a mile away from you, and hits the ground, or a tree: this lightning can still induce currents in unshielded underground and overhead power and data cables. If there is no surge protection, the induced currents may destroy sensitive electronics such as computer power supplies.
In a direct hit situation, lightning hitting a surged protected circuit can easily arc through any surge protector; human safety is paramount in the design of surge protection and electrical systems, anyways, so there are always compromises anyways, that is, surge protectors still share a common ground with everything else, and a direct hit clamped to ground can effect everything else tied to that ground --- Remember, with resistors in parallel, the amount of current is proportional to the resistance - the amount of voltage passing through the higher resistance path is not zero. Even if 99.9% of the lightning strike is clamped to ground, the 0.1% can still be 10000 volts.
No commercially available surge protector apparatus able to be fitted to a home electrical system and other utility lines entering a building with a price that is remotely affordable to the average homeowner is capable of providing remotely robust protection against a direct strike.