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General electrical question

R

righter101

Gold Member
Joined
Dec 5, 2009
Messages
604
Though some of the more knowledgable folks in the electrical division can help.

A friend of mine asked if I had any experience or knowledge about whole house surge protection. I don't.

He is concerned about power company failures and similar and the potential ensuing damage to all the house hold electronics.

Like most, I have my computer and printer set up on a surge protector, but now I think about it, none of the appliances are protected.

Anyone have experience, thoughts, recommendations on whole house surge protection?

I am considering this as an inexpensive insurance policy but don't want to waste money if it does no good.

thanks.
 
Surge Protection works best when "tiered" or "cascading" or "coordinated" surge protection. That is, appliance specific surge prtoection is provided at the outlet of each critical or sensitive appliance or utilization equipment. The next mode of protection is provided at the source of any feeders / panelboards. Then you cover the whole system with a protection at the service entrance & for all other systems serving & supplying the premises (limited energy systems).

Go here and scroll down to Section 5.2 for some guidance:

http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_lhm.html
 
Greetings,

Some years ago when I worked for Borden Ice Cream, I was asked to check out a salesman's claim about surge protection. At the time we were losing some motors and the thought from management that this could be a cause. We were experiencing some spikes up to a couple thousand volts on our 480v gears during this time periodically even though they were of fairly short duration IMO.

It just so happened that a sales guy got a hold of the production superintendant and was just about to sell our management a whole bunch of surge protection equipment for our switch gear. About the time this sales guy had showed up we had rented a very expensive Dranetz line analyzer which would detect the most minute of surges and was also a recording instrument. Bottom line is this guy gave me a sample product and I put it through the tests. Now the easiest way in the world to produce surges when you want them is with the capicitor banks. My partner and I messed around with these gizmos for quite some time with varying tests and equipment placements. We could not find where the devices ever hindered any surges whatsoever. They flat out did not ever any do anything at all that we could figure. I might add that this sales rep had all of the fancy brochures with very enticing testimonials. They had sold this stuff to some really large manufacturing facilities including some big three automotive plants.

Now all of this happened about 24 years ago and things may have changed. Maybe they work now. I can tell you after my experience years ago I would still take all of that with a grain of salt for sure.

BS
 
I agree with Bryan.

I am served by the local rural electric co-op. When I found out that they were selling whole house surge protectors, I purchased one. We don't usually have long outages but we have had multiple interruptions of power which is hard on the electronics. That does not mean that I threw out all the plug-in surge protectors, they are still in place. I doubled down. :cowboy
 
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