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In all likelihood will damage your electronics over time
By
Dan Jon February 2, 2017
When you think of lightning and thunderstorms and electronics you think of a surge protector, but most surges (about 80%) originate within the home as a result of appliances with motors turning on & off (i.e., refrigerator, air conditioner, heater furnace, power tools, washing machines, clothes dryer, vacuum cleaners, blenders, mixers, ceiling fans, just to name a few) or ignition sources turning on & off (i.e., furnaces, electric stove tops). The other 20% come in from outside as a result of trees falling on power lines, power company switching equipment or even lightning discharging nearby and inducing a surge onto either overhead power lines or ones buried in the ground.
Surges in the house might not be that powerful, and the highest amount would be in the order of 90 Joules, but you say to yourself, ha! I've got 5,560 Joules on this surge protector so I am still safe. The main surge protection component for electrical outlets is a device called an MOV (short for Metal Oxide Varistor) and an MOV has to wait for the voltage to reach some level before it turns on (in this case 400 V). Other models have 330V which is better, yet other have 500V or more which is not so good.
Don't get hung up on Joule rating. It's not a good way to buy a surge protector. By way of an example, consider a tire for a car that has a tread wear rating of 80,000 miles. Put 4 of them on your car and you have 320,000 mile tread-wear on your car. That's the way it is with Joules. The manufacturer sums up all the Joule ratings of the protection elements and comes up with a big number. If the manufacturer included 2 or more protection elements in parallel, as soon as one of the protection elements fails, the other never enters into the picture. You thought you were getting a lot of Joules and in the end you got very little.
The higher the MOV voltage that is required to turn the MOV on, the longer the surge protector lasts, and the sooner your electronics starts to behave strangely. So saving a couple of bucks to get the cheap surge protector may not save you any money at all.
A Surge protector like this works by diverting the surge to both the NEUTRAL and the SAFETY GROUND wire on the outlet it's plugged in. The manufacturer cannot guarantee that the surge makes its way all the back to the electrical panel in hour home. Why? Electricity cycles at 60 Hz (60 cycles per second) and has an easy time returning to the electrical panel. If it did not, whenever you flipped a switch the light would never come on, but it does so it's easy for electricity to return on the house wiring and the house wiring has at the very least 4-5 90 degree bends in the wiring. Surges have much large frequencies (300,000 Hz to over 1,000,000 Hz) and have a difficult time with 90 degree turns in house wiring.
By way of an analogy, consider a hand gently coming down on a body of water and pushing through the water going beneath it. Now take the same hand, raise it and slam it as fast as you can against the same body of water and it meets a lot of initial resistance as it hits the surface of the water. That's how it is for electricity at 60 Hz (easy return path) and for surges at 300,000 to over 1,000,000 Hz (hard return path over the same wiring). Surges like straight paths, with no bends in the wiring, that’s why lightning can jump from one wire to another whenever there are sharp turns in the wiring.
So if the surge can't make its way back, where does it go? It'll either show up on another outlet in the same room or enter into the very electronics we're trying to protect. Surges have a current wave and a voltage wave and the current wave comes first and causes the voltage to build up to some value before the MOV can turn on. Until then, you guessed it, your electronics takes a hit. While your gear may not die right away, its life will be shortened.
Surge protectors that include protection for coax, telephone, Ethernet are not helping matters at all; in fact they make things worse. A surge is diverted to the SAFETY GROUND but can then follow that SAFETY GROUND in the surge protector to the COAX, Telephone and/or Ethernet inputs and now the surge is following the coax, telephone and Ethernet connections looking for EARTH GROUND.
The SAFETY GROUND and EARTH GROUND are not the same. The Safety Ground is right there at the outlet where you plugged the surge protector into, while the EARTH GROUND is separated by the wiring from the outlet back to the main electrical panel.
So what can you do to protect your electronics? Is there a better surge protector? The answer is yes, and the technology is called SERIES MODE. Series Mode does not rely on any sacrificial MOV's. They work entirely differently, that is by slowing the surge down in real time, storing the surge energy in capacitor banks and safely bleeding it onto the NEUTRAL wire a few volts at a time. Newer Series MODE filters called Advanced Series Mode totally eliminate the surge. They are not cheap, but you can usually score a bargain on the popular auction site from $30 to $150 for a 2, 6, 8 or 10-outlet model. What's more you can safely plug an MOV surge protector into a SERIES MODE filter to expand the available number of outlets (just don't use the COAX, Telephone, Ethernet inputs on the MOV based Surge Protector). New units start at $160 and are made by Zero Surge, Brickwall, and SurgeX (sold here on Amazon). BTW, a Series Mode filter begins to work at 121.4 VAC on a 120 VAC line. No MOV based surge protector can make that claim. A surge has two components: A current (amperage) wave that precedes the voltage wave, but an MOV can't respond to current, so it has to wait for the voltage to build up and until then, your electronics are fair game.
If you have a coax connection from the outside (cable internet, cable TV (CATV), Antenna) a good way to secure it is to use a hybrid protection device like the Morgan Mfg M-315 VHF/UHF/CATV protector. It uses a combination of an MOV and a GDT (Gas Discharge Tube) to divert the surge to the EARTH ground (it requires a short under 10 foot connection to a buried ground rod). The Gas tube will ignite (glow like a neon light) and the MOV will discharge the energy quickly to the EARTH ground until the energy is gone.
If you are using Ethernet cables in the house (not originating from the outside) and you secure all the devices that use them with a SERIES MODE filter you won't have to secure the CAT 5/CAT 5E/CAT 6 cable itself. Some WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers) use a CAT-5E connection from their outdoor mounted dish to bring the Internet into the house and they use the CAT-5E cable to provide power over internet type connections to power their equipment. If you have a WISP, I would recommend that you run a separate GROUND (as straight as possible) from their equipment to a buried ground rod. In an ideal world you'd want to tie all your ground rods together. In my case I have two and use 6 gauge solid copper wire making a huge arch from one side of the house to the other to tie the two ground rods together.
You might ask about Whole House Surge Protectors and although the idea may seem sound on the surface as there is if properly installed a less than 10 foot connection to the EARTH GROUND, but by nature most of these units will pass some 600V + 25V for each inch of installation wiring with the total being around 1000V. So if a huge surge were coming in from the power lines, the first 1000V would still pass into the house while the rest was diverted to the EARTH which means you still need point of use surge protectors in the house.
As far as warranties are concerned they are generally not worth whatever amount is offered because of the steps that you have to take in order to get reimbursed. Don't have your original receipt (denied), only secured your electrical outlets, but not your coax, phone, Ethernet (denied), used multiple brands (denied). Send us your unit, we'll make a determination (denied, or maybe). If maybe, take your damaged components to a certified repair center & send us the quote to repair the items (you have to pay for any quotes). After you send in the quotes you will get fair market value (based on recent auction or local completed sales) or (the cost to repair the item) whichever is less. If it was a computer, on top of possibly losing access to valuable data, you have to spend hours on the phone. Some warranties require you to have home owners warranties and to file a claim with your insurer first, while they cover the difference which is generally the deductible. So it's easy for someone to offer $100,000, $500,000 or even $1,000,000 warranty coverage because the number of gates (hoops) that you have to make it through is difficult. Many people get the runaround and just give up (they are hoping for that). So faced with all this, if you had just plugged your gear into a Series Mode Filter you could save yourself a lot of grief and frustration down the road. You can even plug this MOV based strip into the Series Mode (just don't use the other ports like coax, phone, Ethernet) on the MOV based strip (i.e., secure those at the service entrance).
This funny because I just came from that thread.
