Do I need surge and spike protection?

If you have money invested in AV equipment, you should be concerned about protecting it from surges and spikes generated both outside and inside your home.  No one is immune, even if you have whole house surge protection.

A common misconception is that we need surge and spike protection for our equipment to protect us from events that happen outside our home, like a lightning strike.  Those of us that live in areas of the country that do not experience lightning strikes are probably safe.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, the biggest generator of surges and spikes is right inside your home and no one is safe from it.

This is one of the biggest reasons why whole house surge protection isn’t effective for protecting our equipment.

Here are the facts.

• A small percentage of surges originate outside a house from nearby lightning strikes, which couple surges into nearby power wires.  This is the rarest of events
• Normal utility operations can cause electrical disturbances
• Perhaps the most common external surge source is when power is interrupted for any reason - a tree falling on wires, a car hitting a pole, wind damage, utility repairs, etc. Wires conducting electricity create a magnetic field. When power is interrupted, the magnetic field collapses, inducing large voltages in the wires. A 12-volt spark coil relies on this principle to generate many thousands of volts to fire spark plugs.
• 80% of surges come from within the home are generated every time equipment cycles on and off.  This is by far the biggest culprit.

Internal surge levels are related to the magnitude of current being interrupted and the length of wire from the power coming into our homes.

The longer the wire and the higher the current, the bigger the surge generated when the power is interrupted.

A classic example is a coffee pot located far from where the power enters your home. Every time the heater kicks on and off to maintain the coffee temperature, significant surges are generated that can affect connected equipment.

It should be obvious that a coffee pot cycling on and off several times an hour is a much more frequent event than a tree falling on the power wires, or a lightning storm.

These are the reasons where specific surge and spike protection are necessary.  Products that protect our equipment, such as the PS Soloist in-wall device , the Duet and Quintet in-line power devices as well as the Power Plant Premier, are important elements in our AV chain.

It probably does not make sense to leave thousands of dollars of AV equipment unprotected when the biggest source of trouble is right in your home.

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