Whole home surge protection - worth it, or not?

[NaN]

This came up today at home - are whole-home surge protections worth it? There seems to be no good immediate information on the occurrences of surges or how often there is damage by outside (not internal) surges. Most of the information is published by insurance companies (All State, State-Farm). There are the claims of 20M!! ground-lightning strokes per year, with no context of how many cause devastating power surges. I even read some article that double lightning hits on the same pole can cause double surges that punish you after the first one broke the fuse on your first line of defense.

For our house, which is an old house, there is a mix of circuits with and without ground wires. I have heard surge protector strips plugged into circuits without ground wires are essentially useless since there is no where for the 'surge' to be dumped. So we do have a mix of electronics (monitors, laptops, etc. ) and appliances (tankless gas water heater, normal kitchen stuff, laundry). If the surge was completely devastating I would say it amounts $15k worth of damage tops. Maybe I am missing something here (damage to panel, etc.)?

The cost of protection? It turns out there are these whole home surge protectors that can be installed at the panel that can grab and dump a significant amount of the incoming surge. Those would cost $200, plus apparently a 2-3 hours of an electricians time since playing with an electrical panel is not my favorite DIY. I would say the cost would be $1k tops.

So, $1k as an insurance against $15k of damages in worst case. I typically agree with the MMM approach on insurance. I don't carry any comprehensive or collision on my car. Assume with healthy savings any disaster can be overcome with these 'being hit by lightning' events. What does collision and comprehensive cost? Well, $400-700 annually depending on where you live. For a $10k car, after 20 years of easily pays for another car if you never had any claims against it.

But for a one-time $1k cost for protecting against most surges seems like potentially falling into the boundary for me, particularly with an old house.

Anyone have any experience with these whole home surge protectors and were they worth it to you?

[BudgetSlasher]

We have one.

The thing itself cost less than $200. I did the install myself.

I have lived in multiple houses without one and never had a problem, even with the surge strips.

I wouldn't pay 1k to have it installed. Maybe if there was electrical work to be done I would add it on.

[NaN]

Yeah, the Siemens brand one is a little under $200.

I could install it myself since we have an exterior panel that feeds an interior panel. Turning the power to the interior panel is incredibly easy.

I did a little research and the voltage trip for the whole house surge protectors is quite high. You still need the strips but at least it protects the strips from seeing anything crazy high. And it also seems like the strips can still dump the excess down the neutral?

Again, is this really a problem? Any electricians/EEs with more knowledge?

[AccidentialMustache]

IANAEE, but I am CS and handy around electronics. Not all surges are from a direct line strike. We had a nearby strike, could have been cloud to ground or cloud to tree or even cloud to cloud at our old house.

It fried the garage door opener and a computer KVM switch. I saw arcing between my desk lamp's metal base and an unused VGA connector's ground shield (sub 1cm distance, but greater than 1mm). There wasn't damage anywhere else that makes me think it was a line surge, rather the lamp's coiled cord (or maybe a coiled shielded VGA cable?) and the garage door opener's detector runs seem to have been oriented right to induct sufficient to start terminating things.

You might consider a rider on your insurance, if it has one available. I have a computers rider. It is cheap per year, covers up to 3k in damages, with no deductible. Used it once successfully when a laptop died -- worked at work, no longer worked when I got home. It probably had the CPU or other BGA crack and became dead half-dead. Power LED lit up but it never started the fan/screen or hit the HDD.

Honestly given how little the rider costs and that first failure (they didn't repair, just paid out original purchase price, which wasn't a ton because the laptop was a netbook), I'm even-up till my 80s.

[Paper Chaser]

If you were to have catastrophic damage from a surge, how much would your homeowner's insurance cover? A lot of policies have some coverage for things like that.

[index]

I installed a Siemens QSA2020SPD myself in my main panel. There was an arc at the street that burned up our neutral connection to the utility. Before we discovered what the problem was, we had many power surges. The surge protector burned up after a week or so. I replaced it with regular 20a breakers while a new one was in the mail. In the three days the surge protector was out, we lost every LED light in the house and a dishwasher main board. I replaced the surge protector and finally figured out the source of the weird electrical gremlins. I think it is some cheap insurance at $120, moreso if you can self install. 

[Daley]

Whole home surge protection isn't the worst idea in the world, especially if you live out in more rural areas or your part of the power grid is already a bit wonky.

I know what I'm about to suggest is something more expensive on its own than what's been suggested thus far, is a conditional usage situation, and may not even be approved by local building code or your power utility despite having extensive UL certification and code approval... but, it's worth knowing about if for no other reason than to not only add additional power protection to the house, but also adds generator connectivity and possible resale value as it kinda kills two birds with one stone while still falling into the roughly $1000 originally cited price point. It's worth noting that we're considering one of these ourselves for our house after the ice storm that knocked our power out for a week last month.

GenerLink Transfer Switches (also normally available through Home Depot) come in models with and without whole home surge. It's basically a cuff that installs on the meter box between the box itself and the meter that provides both an auto-switching generator connection for your home without needing all the additional modifications/upgrades to your existing breaker panel and additional wiring, plus some of the models also provide whole home surge suppression. The most expensive one is $875 plus permits and installation (if, again, your city and utility both permit it - most do now) but that $875 gives you both a generator plug with a 40A rated transfer switch plus a 75kA surge protector per phase that'll work for homes with up to 200A service. Plus, it gives you the flexibility of providing power to any circuit in the house just by toggling breakers instead of having to pick and choose at install time which circuits to include and leave dark with a normal generator switch, so long as you don't plug in more than a total of seven, lest your wiring go KUH-POOEY! or your generator go DRICK!

I figure that if whole home surge protection is genuinely wanted/needed, having a fallback generator isn't too far off on the list behind it. Being able to add both for a bit more than a pro install of only one with a single device seems like a really clever idea and frugal application of resources for adding both features to a home.

[reeshau]

We had a rural home in SE Michigan that had a near lightning strike--no burn damage anywhere, but nearly every electrical thing got wiped out,  The PC's were saved by their UPS'es, who gave their lives in service.  3 TV's bit the dust.  The cable junction box melted.  Washer and dryer freaked out.  The kitchen appliances were OK, but our well pump gave out 3 months afterward.  It was covered by our homeowner's policy, so we only paid the deductible.  But we went through several months of guessing if any odd noise or behavior was belated lightning impact.

Of course, the main box had issues, too, and we did get a whole house surge protector then.  The biggest thing was we felt lucky we didn't lose the computers, and didn't want the hassle of going through everything again.

[NaN]

Interesting story  @index . Was your electrical system in your house old or mostly up to code? Lucky the UPS saved your computers. Though the fact you had the whole home surge protector, it burnt out, and you still had issues is a little concerning.

I have determined I could probably do this myself. I wonder what hardware is out there to analyze my incoming power to see what the surges are like now.

My power grid is a little wonky. We have had 3 power outages in the last week, only lasting 5 minutes. Called the power company and their excuse was "oh, maybe there is a tree hitting the line - or birds".

[Ripple4]

In my house I try to have three elements for surge protectors. The type-2 protector installed in the main panel, a plug-in surge protector on the branch circuits, then for TVs and computers, a surge protector on every data and power connection that enters the “bubble” around that device.

The type 2 protector, should be installed on a breaker at the top of the panel, but the problem is that most high load appliance are already occupying these spots, and their heavy and short wires make it hard to move them.  Also these breakers are often 30-40amp ratings, but many SPDs require 20amp two pole breaker. So while I personally piggy-backed my SPD onto my 40amp oven breaker, it’s not to code, but it’s the best I can do given the much worse alternatives, like not having it there at all.  Some newer panels have a provision for a SPD to fix this problem.

The second point is that surge can come from lighting strokes and from transmission lines touching things during wind storms, but also can come from inside the home. That’s why the washer/dryer, sump pump, AC condenser, garage plugs should have a type-3 SPD, to stop locally generated surges from traveling back to the panel. I like the $5 appliance ones for fridges which have a buzzer if they are surge-damaged and also the ones that have the screw to hold it into the wall fixture.

Lastly surges can travel up power wires, but also RG6 antenna, cable and DSL wires. Also HDMI wires if they run around the house. So my approach is to imagine a bubble around the device like a TV, any wire that enters, needs a SPD. This is why power strips have normal outlets but also coax, RG45 ‘Ethernet’ and RG11 ‘phone’ plugs on them. They make HDMI, Ethernet, RG6 coax SPDs and the bubble-of-protection should have each protected. TV antenna coax should have a ~$6 GDT (gas-discharge-tube) with a good path to ground where it enters the house.

Among the last options to protecting for surges are some extreme steps, and would be something like installing a ground conductor all around the house with a ground spikes periodically placed. This makes the voltage in the earth itself equal on all sides of the building.  And a ground ring in the eves and lighting spikes on the peaks of the roof. People in especially Florida but also other parts of the south need to consider these things. I needed to research this because my arc welder was causing interference in my house, so I had to put in a separate ground spike for it and my weld work table, per the instruction on the welder. Then I wanted to connect the main ground spike to the new one with a solid 6awg conductor buried in the around ½ way around the house, works like a charm.

[index]

Interesting story  @index . Was your electrical system in your house old or mostly up to code? Lucky the UPS saved your computers. Though the fact you had the whole home surge protector, it burnt out, and you still had issues is a little concerning.

I have determined I could probably do this myself. I wonder what hardware is out there to analyze my incoming power to see what the surges are like now.

My power grid is a little wonky. We have had 3 power outages in the last week, only lasting 5 minutes. Called the power company and their excuse was "oh, maybe there is a tree hitting the line - or birds".

The house is over 100 years old, but I rewired it in 2015 and up brought it up to code including the required AFCI breakers, double ground bars, and some nice to haves like the surge protector. In my case, the neutral was slowly burning up on the utility side where it connects to the transformer at the pole. In 2019 (4 years after the rewire), we had weird electrical issues like the HVAC blower whining for a minute before it would spin up, lights would dim, fans would all of a sudden slow down or spin faster etc.  These issues were not constant, they would present for 5 or 10 minutes then everything would act normally for a week or two. This went on for four or five months. I had one of my friends who is a master electrician come over for a diagnosis and we used a multimeter all over the house and could not find any problems.  We chalked it up to issues from the utility.

The whole home surge protector, which I linked earlier, has two 20-A circuits one of which was going to my furnace air handler. The surge protector breakers tripped and there was a burnt smell from the breaker. I figured the utility had given it enough. I ordered a new surge protector from Amazon and replaced the breakers with some spare 20A breakers so we had heat while waiting for the new surge protector to arrive. Later that day a surge fried all the LED bulbs in the house. I finally called the utility who sent out a lineman who diagnosed the problem. An hour later, we had a new neutral connection and everything has been fine since.   

I guess I should have called the utility earlier. With the surge protector in place, I dismissed the problem as little power surges or voltage drops from the utility. I talked to neighbors who complained about flickering lights or the occasional small surge; I thought my problems may have just been what everyone was experiencing.

[NaN]

Ah, thanks @index. I guess two-day shipping was not fast enough and you needed 1-hour quad-copter drone delivery.

Yeah, so we have a new panel with AFCI/GFCI breakers but have not rewired the house. I would love to do that, but it sounds like a pain. You wonder though how many house fires with poor/old wiring are actually just fine if the utility side was 'safe' and well-maintained. I wonder if there is a device to monitor the power coming from the utility and determine how clean it is. Kind of like the Sense smart-device, but for looking out instead of in.