When it comes to protecting your home from unfortunate situations, your mind may immediately go to getting homeowner’s insurance coverage. While this can be helpful to get compensated when an unfavorable event happens, trying to prevent the event in the first place can be more advantageous. When it comes to your home’s electrical system, one thing you can do is have a whole-home surge protector installed.
Understanding the Dangers of Power Surges
Power surges can be dangerous for your home’s electrical system and everything plugged into it. A power surge happens when too much voltage is sent into your electrical system. When this happens, it can cause extensive overheating. This can lead to permanent damage to your system’s components, electronics, and appliances. In severe cases of overheating, an electrical fire can develop.
How Do Power Surges Happen?
One of the most common reasons that a power surge develops is that your local power grid has an interruption in its supply that immediately re-establishes its connection. Your local power grid can go out due to numerous reasons, like equipment failure and lightning strikes. Anytime that a power surge sends excess voltage through your line, it can spell disaster.
What Is a Surge Protector?
A surge protector is specifically designed to absorb excess voltage that travels through a specific circuit. Surge protectors will have a clamping voltage which is the minimum amount of voltage that must pass through the line before the surge protector will start absorbing energy. Surge protectors will also have a maximum absorption rate, which signals how much energy the surge protector can absorb before allowing excess voltage through the circuit.
There are two different styles of surge protectors that you can purchase for your home. Most people are familiar with power strip surge protectors. These are a long strip that has multiple outlets connected to a single power cord that gets plugged into a traditional three-pronged outlet. These are commonly used for entertainment centers and computer setups to help protect sensitive electronic equipment from power surges.
The second type of surge protector is going to be the whole-home surge protector. This device gets installed directly onto your electrical panel box. This allows it to monitor the voltage coming into your home from the city’s main power supply line. Whenever excess voltage is detected, a whole-home surge protector will be able to absorb that excess energy before it can reach any component of your electrical system or anything plugged into it. There’s no doubt that whole-home surge protectors hold many advantages over traditional power strip surge protectors.
Protect Everything Electrical
If you actually sit down and think about all the electrical components of your home, there are a lot of them. From the components of your electrical system like your outlets and light switches to your appliances and electronic devices like your television, the cost of replacing all of these components can be exceedingly expensive.
Unfortunately, if your home experiences a nasty power surge, it can cause damage to all of these components. Investing in a whole-home surge protector will help to provide you with peace of mind that these items will be safe and your financial well-being will be protected.
More Economic Than Power Strip Surge Protectors
Another great benefit of investing in a whole-home surge protector is that it’s much more economical than trying to invest in multiple power strip surge protectors. You don’t have to worry about going around to all your different electronic areas and plugging them all into a power surge strip. You simply have an electrician install your whole-home surge protector and everything electrical in your home, including your electrical system, electronic devices, and appliances, is protected from damage.
Choosing a Whole-Home Surge Protector
When selecting a new whole-home surge protector, there are various factors that you’ll want to consider. One of the first is going to be whether or not it has smart connectivity. Modern-day surge protectors can connect wirelessly to your smartphone via an app to help alert you if there is a power surge or the surge protector stops working.
Another factor that you’ll want to consider is the clamping voltage of the surge protector. If you have very sensitive electronics in your home, you may want to consider getting a whole-home surge protector with a lower-than-normal clamping voltage to protect those devices.
DIY vs. Professional Installation
When it comes to installing a surge protector at your home, you have the option of doing it yourself or hiring a professional electrician to do the job. It’s going to be most beneficial to have a licensed electrician do the installation because of the fact that the surge protector needs to be installed at the panel box. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it can be very dangerous working with electricity.
Furthermore, most whole-home surge protector manufacturers will require that a professional do the installation to activate the warranty coverage on your device. Additionally, having a professional who has the appropriate experience and tools to do the job can provide you with peace of mind that it was done correctly and up to modern-day code standards.
How Long Will It Last?
Most whole-home surge protector devices will have a usable lifespan of around five years. The overall lifespan of your specific device is going to be highly dependent on the number of power surges that it regularly experiences, the amount of energy that it’s absorbing, and the amount of maintenance that it receives. You should aim to have your whole-home surge protector undergo a professional evaluation every year during your regular household electrical inspection.
Are There Any Downsides?
There’s no doubt that purchasing anything for your home does come along with some downsides you should always be aware of. One of the more notable ones when it comes to a whole-home surge protector is its upfront purchase price. It’s obviously going to be free not to install one. However, when you compare the cost of having to replace even just one appliance compared to the cost of a whole-home surge protector, it tends to make sense to purchase the surge protector.
Another downside to be knowledgeable about is that no whole-home surge protector can protect your home from every possible electrical event. Most modern surge protectors can have an absorption rate of up to 40,000 amps. With the typical lightning strike being below 30,000 amps, there’s no doubt that a whole-home surge protector can protect your electrical system and everything plugged into it in most unfortunate power surge scenarios.
However, there have been some rare lightning strikes that have introduced 100,000 amps of power. If your home’s electrical system happens to get hit by one of these very rare lightning strikes, your electronics and appliances can still endure permanent damage and may even experience an electrical fire.
Expert Whole-Home Surge Protection Service
Anderson Heating, Cooling, Plumbing & Electric offers expert whole-home surge protection services to the Mentor, OH area. We can also assist with all your plumbing, electrical, heating, air conditioning, drain, and sewer needs. Call our office today to schedule an appointment with one of our knowledgeable electricians.
