Home surge & spike suppression

[rthorntn]

Hi,

I would really appreciate some advice on how to protect expensive electronics from rogue power.

At the moment I just have one or two crappy power boards that supposedly have some kind of protection.

How do people here protect their stuff, APC?

Does anybody put protection in the fuse box to protect the whole house?

What about phone, Ethernet and TV antenna protection?

Lightning protection?

Thanks.

Richard

[HackedFridgeMagnet]

The best surge protection includes a low pass filter which has a series inductor. As well as either MOVs or Sparkgaps.

Many brands around. You can get one wired into your switch board on a sub circuit, if you have space. Or one on a sub distribution board, or even one filter that covers the whole premises, but these probably need paperwork from the supply authority which is miles harder than actually wiring it.

The series inductor means a small insertion loss of maybe 3% power at full load, correspondingly less at lower loads.

If you go the power board way then you will have trouble getting the inductor in the filter.

[David Hess]

An online UPS or power conditioner will work better than any surge suppressor unless it itself becomes damaged.

[Phaedrus]

You can purchase or build a line conditioner. Assuming you don't need the voltage offset feature (for over or under voltage conditions) it's basically an LC filer with a couple of big ass coils and X capacitors, plus a TVS diode and MOV.

[rthorntn]

Thanks everyone!

What about phone, ethernet and TV antenna protection, is it worthwhile, do you use it?

It sounds like a power conditioner is the way to go, would you just have small ones protecting key items, what brands are best?

[johansen]

it really depends on what you want to protect against.
a direct lightning strike to your 120/240v utility drop is not something many can even afford to protect against.

MOVs are cheap. a handful of them installed in your fuse box will stop most "surge" events, but i have heard two cases in my life where 7200vac got dumped into someone's house because the utility worker made a mistake while replacing the pole transformer.
in one of those cases the utility paid for everything they destroyed, in the other, the fire department had to be called.

the short answer is buy one of those whole house arrestors that install within a few feet of the fuse box, and the reason you have to do that is because your insurance might not pay for your custom MOV box burning your house down.