Not long ago, electrical contractor Allen Gallant was about halfway through the job of completely rewiring a 3,200-square-foot house in Acton, Massachusetts, when the owners decided to save some money and not install whole-house protection against power surges. Sure enough, soon after the house was finished, Gallant got a phone call from the distressed owners: Lightning had struck a utility pole near their house, sending a tidal wave of voltage through the wires, past the main breaker panel, and into the house. "It burned out the motherboard in the Sub-Zero refrigerator, fried the temperature controls in the double-wall oven, killed six dimmers, two computers, and every GFCI plug in the house," Gallant says. "It was an $11,000 loss."
Many homeowners believe that adequate surge protection begins and ends with plugging their computer into a power strip. Unfortunately, that's seldom the case. First of all, not all surge protectors live up to their name; some are little more than glorified extension cords. Second, a surge will follow any wire into a house — phone and cable lines included — and threaten fax and answering machines, televisions, satellite systems, computers, and modems. And third, as the owners in the Acton remodel discovered, delicate electronic circuitry has pro-liferated throughout our homes, leaving common appliances as vulnerable as computers to the effects of surges.
