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As a homeowner, there are several items you can invest in that can provide protection for your home. Unfortunately, not all items are worth the hype. We’re going to dive into more detail about what a whole-home surge protector is and whether it’s a worthy investment for your home.
What’s a Power Surge?
A power surge happens when an excessive amount of voltage passes through a power line. This can happen for numerous reasons, such as a lightning strike. When a power surge happens, this excess voltage can create permanent damage to your home’s electrical system and anything that’s plugged into it. This includes your electronics and appliances. In severe cases, the overheating caused by a power surge can cause a fire to erupt.
What’s a Surge Protector?
A surge protector is an electrical device that’s specifically designed to absorb the excess voltage to prevent it from passing further down the line and damaging your items. Surge protectors are made to reroute that excess energy to your home’s grounding system, where the energy will be safely absorbed back into the ground.
Most homeowners are familiar with power strip surge protectors. In fact, a lot of people use these for their entertainment systems to protect sensitive electronics, like their televisions and gaming consoles. However, there’s a second type of surge protector that you can invest in called the whole-home surge protector.
What Is a Whole-Home Surge Protector?
Instead of just protecting the devices that are plugged into a power strip, a whole-home surge protector is designed to protect your home’s electrical system and everything plugged into it. This includes things like your lighting fixtures, appliances, and televisions.
A whole-home surge protector gets installed directly on your electrical panel box. This allows it to handle any excess current traveling through the power line before it can encounter your electrical panel box and electrical circuits. It’s important to have a professional do the installation for you to ensure that it’s up to local code standards and operates effectively.
Absorption Ratings
When selecting a whole-home surge protector, it’s important to understand what its absorption rating is. This is a figure that directly describes how much energy the surge protector can safely absorb. Any power surge up to the surge protector’s absorption rating will be safely handled.
However, anything above that rating can be dangerous to your electrical system and all the things that you have plugged into it. Most whole-home surge protectors are available with an absorption rating of 40,000 amps. This is more than enough to handle most lightning that your system may encounter.
It’s vital to note that while whole-home surge protectors can be extremely helpful to protect your home’s electronics and electrical system, they’re not 100% effective. There have been some rare instances of lightning strikes reaching up to 100,000 amps. There’s simply not a whole-home surge protector that has an absorption rating to handle that amount of energy. While a whole-home surge protector will drastically minimize any damage to your home, it can’t eliminate your risk of damage.
Clamping Voltages
All whole-home surge protectors will be given a clamping voltage rating. This describes the amount of voltage that must pass through the surge protector before it starts absorbing excess energy. If you have a lot of sensitive electronics in your home, you may want to consider getting a whole-home surge protector with a low clamping voltage to prevent unwanted damage to those devices.
Wi-Fi Capability
Just like many other household systems, whole-home surge protectors are available with integrated smart technology. You can purchase a surge protector that will conveniently connect to an app on your smartphone thanks to Wi-Fi connectivity. This can alert you when there’s a power surge or even let you know when your surge protector is experiencing a malfunction. This will allow you to respond quickly to get the problem solved before the next power surge happens.
Prevent Costly Appliance Replacements
A whole-home surge protector can be a great investment for any homeowner to help protect them from having the large financial expense of replacing damaged appliances. Without a whole-home surge protector, all it can take is one substantial power surge to cause permanent damage to one or more of your appliances.
If you sit down and think about all the appliances and even electronics you have in your home, there’s likely a lot. Trying to foot the bill to replace every one of those items can be exceedingly costly, to say the least. Fortunately, a whole-home surge protector can be a great way to help drastically lower your risk of experiencing any major damage to your appliances and electronics.
More Effective Than Power Strips
If you already have some surge protector power strips, you may believe that upgrading to a whole-home surge protector simply isn’t worth it. However, a whole-home surge protector is going to have a much higher absorption rate than a simple power strip surge protector. Even better, you don’t have to worry about plugging all your sensitive items into a power strip. You can simply use your outlets and conveniently protect all your electronics with a whole-home surge protector.
Protect Your Electrical System
While it can be easy to think that your home’s electrical system isn’t extensive because a lot of it is hidden behind walls, that’s simply not the case. Your electrical system has many different components, including circuit breakers, wiring, lighting, outlets, light switches, and so forth. A whole-home surge protector will help protect all the components of your home’s electrical system from harm. This device can also be helpful for boosting the sale value of your home in the future.
Minimize Electrical Fire Risk
The thought of having an electrical fire at your home can be quite scary. It can be even worse if the fire starts with the wiring that’s hidden behind your wall. Your home may already have a large fire before you even realize what’s going on. A whole-home surge protector can help mitigate any excess energy to prevent the overheating of your electrical system. This will minimize your risk of experiencing an electrical fire at your home, which can bring you peace of mind about the overall safety of your home.
How Long Do They Last?
The average whole-home surge protector is designed to last for around five years. The overall lifespan of your unit will highly depend on numerous factors. Some of the usual factors include the amount of maintenance that it receives and how many power surges your home experiences. It’s best to have one of our electricians test your surge protector during your annual electrical inspection to keep it in excellent condition.
Expert Whole-Home Surge Protection Service
Pipe Works Services offers whole-home surge protection services to the Chatham, NJ community. We can also help with all your heating, air conditioning, plumbing, electrical, insulation, ductwork, indoor air quality, ice damming, commercial, and home energy audit needs. Simply call Pipe Works Services today to book your next service appointment.
