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    Benefits of Whole-Home Surge Protection

    April 13, 2018

    Here in the Tampa area, storms are something we deal with all the time. Lightning just comes with the territory, and we’re used to it. Just because the sky lights up all the time doesn’t mean lightning isn’t dangerous, though. It’s still dangerous, and in addition to sometimes causing legitimate harm, lightning can damage the sensitive electronics in your home.

    Add in the 20 or so power surges the average homeowner experiences every day (although these surges you might not even notice) and the opportunities for a piece of equipment to be damaged are abundant. You could invest in a handful of smaller, point-of-use surge protectors, but a better investment might be to hardwire a whole-home surge protector into your panel. Electric Today’s team of experienced technicians is well-versed in this area, and they can work with you to find the best way to protect your valuable electronics.

    How Do They Work?

    When an exceptionally strong current powers its way through your home’s electrical grid, it can overpower the grid’s capabilities. What a whole-home surge protector does is reroute that greater-than-normal overload into the ground, shouldering the current and depositing it away from where it can affect your home.

    Power surges can be costly. A study by the Insurance Information Institute found that homeowners suffered over $1 billion in losses in 2008 thanks to them, and an average claim can run a bill of roughly $4,300. Saving money is something we can all appreciate, and especially so in an area where something like this can happen every day.

    • Power surges occur every day. They can happen when an appliance that runs through cycles (like your refrigerator) restarts after stopping, and the electricity spikes – sometimes as much as 20 per day. Most of the time it’s not a problem, but it occasionally can be.
    • Of course, that’s not the only time it can happen. Downed power lines, lightning and wiring problems can also be a cause for power surges.

    Whole-Home Surge Protection

    Surge-protection options to defend your home are generally split into whole-home units or single, point-of-use plug-in protectors.

    • Plug-in protectors are the ones you’ve seen laying around everywhere. They only offer protection for the devices you connect to that single unit, and their amperage limit is going to obviously be significantly lower than a whole-home protector.
    • Whole-home surge protectors vary in the cap of how much it can protect before it gets tripped. Some offer as little as 10,000-amp protection, but some can defend against 100,000-amp surges.
    • They are hardwired into your electrical panel, so any electricity that gets funneled into your home must pass through the surge protector as well. These units offer benefits like warranties, lower repair costs on the back end, and alarms that alert you when it’s been tripped.

    A surge protector is like insurance, in a way. Having it before anything hits could seem like an irritating use of money you could put toward something more immediate, but when you need it…you really need it. A whole-home surge protector can provide you with much-needed peace of mind that everything will run smoothly and without error, and you can keep enjoying the use of your electronics and appliances without ever giving a second thought to their status.

    To learn even more about a whole-home surge protector and decide if it’s something you want to consider, give Electric Today a call at 813-653-4221 and we’ll do everything we can to make you and your family feel totally safe when power surges strike.