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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?"
" protecting all the electronics in my house with a single surge protector?" That's going to be a lot of extension cords
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.
http://www.dehn.de/pdf/blitzplaner/BBP_2007_E_complete.pdf
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.
That's the 'key phrase' to use when talking to folks, "Transient Surge Protection". Covers everything from the neighbors 220v welder switching on to an induced over voltage from a near hit 1/4 mile away or so.
There isn't a simple "plug 'n play" solution. For example, Motorola's R-56 communications site standard is some 500 pages of how to do this. It takes intentional planning and a bit of engineering as there are at least 2, if not more goals to consider. NEC and local codes come into play as well.
It's not a trivial task. It won't tolerate a trivial solution. Expect to spend some time and money to do it right or risk not only a false sense of security but the chance of making things worse.
links:
http://www.radioandtrunking.com/downloads/motorola/R56_2005_manual.pdf
I highly recommend you check out Raycap products (http://www.raycapsurgeprotection.com/), they're widely used in the Telecom industry and I use then in all my DataCenters.
I live in a lightning-prone area, but never taken a hit. it's a gamble, but that's what insurance is for to begin with. sounds like you already have all you need, why spend more money to protect appliances unless they can't be replaced? whatever your deductible is has got to be cheaper than the type of solution you're looking for.
Any electrician will tell you that whole house surge protection does not replace local surge protection. It stops most of the spike but not all of it. You still have to have surge protection strips locally for sensitive equipment.
The keyword you used is overload. Breakers prevent against high LOAD. A surge is not load, it is a momentary, sometimes only milliseconds, spike in line voltage that cruises right on through a circuit breaker like it's not even there.
You're confusing current and voltage. Fuses and breakers are over-current devices, Transient Surge Suppressors are over-voltage devices. A high voltage at low amps can destroy all the electronics in the house without tripping a breaker or burning a fuse. The only thing that over-current devices protect against are short circuits in devices or in wiring, or excessive load that might overheat wiring.
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Seriously, finding a single phase SPD to protect your house is expensive. And if they take a direct strike, they'll blow out and need to be replaced (also expensive). Your best bet would be to install some lightning protection air terminals on the roof of your house, and run some down conductors to ground rods. This'll be expensive too, but there's less of a chance of needing a replacement. If you really want to go the SPD route, Siemens has some good products.
Honestly, I wouldn't do either. I'd put some surge protectors on my most expensive electronics and just go through the process of unplugging things when a big storm comes up. If that isn't an option, then be prepared to spend money.
I have a surge protector connected to my power meter and the power company even guarantees your appliances against surges. Here is a link to FPL's "SurgeShield"
Errrr - no. Lightning strikes nearby are nothing at all like the normal, slow over-current events that fuses and/or breakers are designed to handle. I've seen panels completely melted. Of course, at that point, every electronic device and quite a few appliances had already absorbed some much energy that they were equally fried. Like STDs and AIDS, there is good protection available, just not perfect.
When I had my house converted to circuit breakers, it was less than $100 for them to add the whole-house surge, but the electrician was already there for the panel replacement. The whole job was only $700, but that was a good decade or so ago.
It just slots into two of the circuit breaker spaces, so I'm assuming it's just open the panel cover and swap 'em out should something go wrong. (mind you, he also drove in a couple of new grounding rods outside, and connected it all up, so the installation was a little more than just slotting them in)
Whole house brownouts on the other hand ... that's something I've still got issues with, but I'm not willing to put up the money for a giant flywheel.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Effective lightning protection is layered. The socket surge protectors are actually meant to be used in combination with the other layers, not standalone. A close enough lightning strike will induce strong currents in the wiring between the fuse box and your appliances. The surge protectors are designed to protect against the resulting voltage and not much more, and obviously a central surge protector can not protect your appliances if it's not between the surge and the appliance. Stronger surges from lightning strikes into the power lines outside your house on the other hand will not be stopped by the small surge protectors alone. You need both. And then you'll also want a lightning rod to prevent direct strikes into your wiring, because no surge protector would be able to handle a direct strike.
We've got an observatory on a hill with air cabling and plenty of lightning. Our three-stage
protection has never failed through the power line. DSL connections have died many times through the
telephone lines.
First line of defence are large MOV devices with separate grounding installed at the nearest pole. Cost about 600USD.
Second line is at the breaked boxes, cost 400 USD.
Third line is done with 'normal' plug-level protectors for the most sensitive equipment.
Google for Phoenix Contact surge protection..
often even come with offers of an 'insurance policy/guarantee' built in for the value of your home electronics if they do get fried
Those are carefully written to be absolutely unclaimable. You'd have better luck just using the best buy replacement program (sarc tag)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Here is an excellent panel mounted surge suppressor. http://ep2000.com/index.php?page=industrial
It isn't cheap (several hundred dollars IIRC) but excellent quality.
Do you have lightning rod(s) installed nearby? If not, they can obviously help a lot.
Protecting against surges (Transients) and Lightning strikes are 2 very different things. I have worked in some of the nicest tier IV data centers with state of the art redundant power systems and protection. Most Tier IV data centers will have a "Lightning Detection" system. They will count on their power systems and grounding to help, but still track area lightning strikes and be on alert to check things should lightning hit them or close to them. The reason is because there is not gaurantee's when it comes to lightning. That much energy can jump gaps in blown breakers, fuses, and circuits and cause all sorts of havoc, even if the Generator and UPS is still up. Now, transient surge suppression is a different issue and not too expensive for whole home systems IMO. It is not a guarantee, but it is better than nothing at all. http://www.apc.com/products/family/index.cfm?id=174 (this is link to APC residential hard wire panel mount surge suppression options at list cost). Couple a home solution like the APC units above that protects all the random outlets in your house, with strategically placed UPS systems (behind entertainment center, in the office, etc.) and you are getting a decent ammount of protection from the normal surges and near strikes. In closing, lightning is a odd thing. I have been in a house and care that where "stuck". In the car, almost everything was fine, radio lost its pre-sets and time, etc. but that was about it. I don't remember even having any fuses go out. In the house, some things where fried, others where fine. For example, my roommates TV was toast, but the main one in the living room was OK, neither where on UPS. The cordless phone was fine, but the speakers in the corded handset where toast and would only squeal when you turned on the phone.
Protecting an entire building from lightning is a solved problem. You need a lightning rod.
My aunt and uncle live in a hundred year old farm house. It has a lightning rod. Their butter churn has never had to be replaced due to a blown circuit.
Honestly, how important are surge protectors? Don't most have a disclaimer that they don't protect vs lightning anyway?
I'm sure for large businesses or extreme cost equipment they are a good investment, but for home users are they really needed?
(Honest question since I don't really know)
A strike anywhere close to your house can cause a lot of havoc. And any one item you have to replace may not seem so bad, but you could also lose several at once.
I lost an ethernet port, the controller for my home alarm system, the controller for my garage door opener and a 35" TV set in one strike. Altogether this cost over $800 bucks to recover from and I didn't even replace the TV!. All of this was also in a new, well-grounded house.
I'm in Iowa - not really a legendary place for lightning - and have had personal run-ins with lightning damage 3 times in the last 7 years. (I lost an entire house to one!)
Everything in your home with digital electronics in it - and that leave little out these days - is especially vulnerable.
Not at all. Parent post suggested a second option: Insurance. One option is to try to make sure nothing ever fails. The second option is to assume that things will fail, and have a recovery plan. This is a vaild suggestion.
I think he wanted experienced, hobbyist advice. Or even a bit of professional advice, considering the large number of electricians around here.
Your reply suggests that the only thing preventing him knowing how to perfectly secure his electrical possessions is that he can't spell "surge", or doesn't know of this google thing.
Buzz off. Anyone can google for a product. The question wasn't "are there surge protectors designed to protect a home", but "what are my options? what works well? can I trust a single device to do all I need it to?"
You gave us a comparative shopping list. Brilliant.
Exactly. In fact, in some courses (sigh...flame suit on...MBA classes, specifically), you are taught to always consider not only a few viable and different options, but also the "do-nothing" option. Evaluate what happens if questioner does nothing, i.e. stays with the status quo.
Sometimes people come up with all kinds of extravagant and ridiculous schemes and never stop to consider "well, I know my boss said 'do something', but what would be the consequences if we left things as they are?". The answer may not be palatable to the person with the bucks, but then again the do-nothing approach could turn out to be the best option.
I know MBA courses are not the sole preserve of such wisdom, but that's where I had it drummed into me (possibly in an effort to try and avoid the kinds of expensive mistakes that make people sneer at MBAs). First option in your list - do nothing, stay with what you have now. Expenses, risks, benefits.
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).
Whole-house surge protectors run $40-60 at Lowes and Home Depot (Siemans/SquareD), but you're best to get an electrician to install them because they need to be installed in the breaker box. One type is a double-breaker and clamps into the A & B busses with a wire to ground. The other has three wires to the same places.
IMHO whole-house is _much_ better than power-strip MOVs because of the reduced impedence to ground -- the rod is near the box. Also, check your ground rod and upgrade clamps -- they often deteriorate (loosen or corrode).
Make sure phone & cable TV entrances are also grounded, preferably to the same stake. If they are on opposite sides of [old] houses, you are going to occasionally fry equipment from nearby lightening strikes due to transient ground potential difference.
In my experience, getting a good ground is sometimes the toughest part of home electrical upgrades, period!
Twice in a row now, I'm moved into homes that were built in the 1950's or 1960's, and didn't even provide 3 prong grounded wall outlets.
In both cases, I tried to hire an electrician to upgrade my home to properly grounded outlets, and after they did a few basic tests, essentially told me they weren't willign to go through the trouble it would take to do it. (Basically, they decided the only good way to accomplish it involved sinking a rod into the ground outside and wiring the main buss to it with an underground cable.) Either they were too lazy to do it, or simply thought it would take too much of their time to be able to quote me anything like a reasonable price for the project.
Not true, just like AIDS and other STDs, there most certainly is a perfect protection available....its just that most people don't like sitting in the dark with all of their electronics unplugged, especially if they aren't getting laid either.
Of course, in either case, this solution is not considered fun.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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.
That's fine and all, but those are LED LASERS, not LED lights, the post he was referring to was talking about an LED light. LED lights are up to 23 watts being the same as an incandescent being 100 watts (REF: http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/05/07/193200/philips-releases-100w-equivalent-led-bulb-runs-on-just-23-watts?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed )
LED lasers like all lasers at a much lower power rate are hazardous due to the radiation aspect of it (Light Amplification from Simulated Emission of Radiation)
Or you could use "reverse insurance". That is instead of making payments ahead of time and claiming the value of the item if it fails, you wait until it fails then buy the replacement on credit and make payments over time until it's payed off.
False: a close enough strike will induce currents in things that are unplugged. This is especially bad if the things that are unplugged are feedlines to antennae, but it can happen with any metal object, given a sufficiently close strike.
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.
Surge protector Fraud Alert: The maximum allowed energy of the $30 surge protector, 560 joules, is tiny. It seems that the manufacturer is taking advantage of the ignorance of most people and Home Depot about electricity.
A joule is 2.78 x 10-4 Watt-Hours of energy. Calculating the maximum energy allowed by the surge protector: 2.78 x 10-4 * 560 = 0.15568 Watt-Hours. That means the surge protector can protect against a 1,000 watt surge for 0.00015568 hours. If I calculated correctly, that is 1,000 watts for 0.560448 seconds. More realistically, a lightning strike would cause at least a 10,000 watt surge. The surge protector could protect against that for 56 milliseconds, a trivial amount of time. I've seen lightning strikes that lasted more than a hundred milliseconds. The current in a 10,000 watt surge at the rated 175 volts is only about 57 amps. If you want to protect against a more realistic 570 amp surge, the protector will last only 5 milliseconds until it explodes.
The surge protector linked may just have 3 small MOVs.
Some surge protectors give no indication or inadequate indication when they have burnt and stopped protecting. The linked description says, "LED indicates operational status". For you to know if the device is working, you must check to see if the LED is lit. That's not convenient if it is installed in "service-entrance locations".
The Home Depot web page to which you linked says,
"36,000 Amp maximum
20,000-volt maximum surge current".
The "maximum surge current" listed is said to be 36,000 amps, but that is for a minuscule amount of time. Volts are not current; saying "20,000-volt maximum surge current" is ignorant.
Translation: The CEO of Home Depot has no technical knowledge and should be replaced immediately. If I were CEO of Home Depot, one of the first things I would do would be to make sure all the descriptions were accurate; I would not allow sneaky, tricky product descriptions.
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.
I should add that if you have iron pipes, you can get much of the same protection by grounding to the water pipes at the closest point to where they run underground.
That might not meet code, these days, but it used to for a very long time. And it will give you a serviceable ground.
Don't ground to your gas pipe, though. Not A Good Idea.
The NEC these days has you drive a 6'-8' ground rod underneath the panel at the service entrance, bonded to the panel. You ALSO have to run bare copper back to the service entrance for water, and bond to that as well. In case one or the other fails, you still have a reliable path to ground. It's not simply a matter of bonding to grounds though. The panel itself needs to include a bus bar for tying all the individual grounds together, and providing a path to both both bonded ground points. So now you're basically looking at a service change, replacing the panel, meter, and mast (if applicable). It's not horribly expensive, but it's not cheap either (I used to do em for around $5k-10$k depending on the job, but that was years ago).
Lightning is weird and it is very difficult to predict what may be harmed by a strike.
Just like my ex-wife!
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
http://www.mikeholt.com/mojonewsarchive/LSP-HTML/HTML/TVSS-Protection-Questions-and-Answers~20040708.php
Those guys know their electricals.
Damage from a close lightning strike will probably not be mitigated by whole house surge suppressors. But I would still install one. The important point to look for is UL 1449-listed devices. Then at specific locations, install a good surge suppressor. Kinda like computer defense-in-depth. Something from ZeroSurge will help if your home is old and doesn't have ground; otherwise, a normal MOV surge suppressor requires good ground. This would be equipment ground and is not the same as your grounding rods/water pipe ground. The latter are really for lightning strikes. ZeroSurge doesn't use MOVs and don't rely on equipment ground. You may also want to consider getting a line conditioner but I haven't done any research on their viability.
I'm looking at the Leviton 51120. Depending if your house is single or three phase, you'll need to get the right model for the type of service you're receiving. The Leviton is nice because it comes with its own J-box for extra protection. Eaton (Cutler-Hammer) has one but it's normally attached on the bottom of the buss bars while a lot of other companies recommend their TVSSes be installed on a breaker that is the closest to the service conductors. I prefer the standalone devices like the Leviton because they could be installed on any panel instead of a specific brand. The Leviton can also pigtail into an existing breaker. If you have Eaton/Square D QO breakers, you could attach up to 2 hots per breaker.
If you do decide to get one installed, make sure you or the electrician make the conductors as short as possible and don't create too sharp a turn in them.
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.
You ALSO have to run bare copper back to the service entrance for water, and bond to that as well. In case one or the other fails, you still have a reliable path to ground.
That's not why you have to do it; "grounding" is relative and not a magic thing that guarantees no current will flow, electrical current can flow between "ground" connections. Ground potential varies from place to place, 10 feet away, ground can be at a different potential. Geology, Electromagnetic interference, solar activity, lightning, electrical faults elsewhere, and other factors can further exacerbate the difference.
Bonding is required for the same reason that Neutral and Ground must be connected together at one place (the main service panel). If you do not have Plumbing Ground and Electrical ground bonded, you have different parts of your system connected to ground at different places ---- this means, the ground on your service panel can now be at a different electrical potential than your plumbing.
What this means, is that if something conductive touches both your plumbing, and something connected to the main panel ground (or neutral), current will flow through that conductive thing, to equalize the potential of the different grounds.
If that conductive thing is a human, this could very well mean that someone dies, because they touched the tap electrically connected to the plumbing, and a kitchen appliance with a metal chassis connected to neutral.
Therefore, the requirement is that you already have these bonded together with a low resistance path.. The bonding ensures that both systems are always at the same potential, so current does not flow between Neutral or Main panel ground and your plumbing.
Your MBA training is obvious. Had you pursued an engineering degree, you would have had to do a certain amount of lab time. Lab time gives you the practical knowledge that the do nothing option is purposely placed last on the list. This gives the MBA managers the requisite number of meetings to discuss all other options and keeps them out of our hair .
Which also lets you take off your tinfoil hat indoors.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Just use surge protectors where needed that have an equipment replacement guarantee
Those guarantees are usually worthless I'm afraid. If you read the small print they require you to send affected items to them for evaluation. Do you really want to send them your fridge and wait for them to decide if a surge killed it and then buy you another (inferior) one?
Just get home contents insurance with a reasonable policy.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Having grounds at a different potential can wreck havoc on signal circuits too. In the '70s I ran the newsroom of a Canadian radio station and we were getting hum on the phone lines, enough to make it annoying when we did interviews over the phone and then used the clips on the air. I spoke to our chief engineer and we went up to the phone distribution frame above the studio complex. I asked for his multimeter to check the ground on the power outlet against the ground on the phone company rack. Sure enough there was a 5 volt difference.
I said, "I bet if we tie those two grounds together with four gauge wire, the hum will disappear." The chief engineer looked at me funny, not realizing I had been tinkering with electronics most of my life, plus I studied electrical engineering and I had an FCC first phone ticket, but I liked news better, especially on rock and roll radio.
Of course he was also baffled when I asked for the cart machine cue lights to be displayed in the news booth. He said "There are six machines in the control room and I only have three pair going to the news booth." I drew him a quick diode array and said, "Here. You can do it on a pair and a half." He left scratching his head but built it and it worked.
There was a downside though when he came into my office in the newsroom two weeks later with a roll of blueprinted schematics and asked for help with the 50KW AM transmitter modulator circuit.
If your only tool is a hammer, you'll approach every problem as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow