On Thursday, December 10, 2015 at 5:46:04 AM UTC-6, wrote:
On Thu, 10 Dec 2015 00:25:32 -0800 (PST), Uncle Monster
wrote:

As I recall, you live in Florida, the lightning capital of the country. ^_^

Yup, we take surge protection seriously here.
In my previous life as a Physical Planning Rep at IBM, we did not have
the luxury of telling our customers to unplug everything every time
there was a thunderstorm (pretty much every day in the summer) so we
needed to design systems that mitigated the damage. We got pretty good
at it. It can be summed up by saying you trap the surge and shunt it
into the ground. You use MOVs and chokes along with a lot of copper.

I recall reading about DOD studies concerning the protection of a building's electrical system and equipment from an electromagnetic pulse attack. What they figured out was to cascade the protection and put surge arresters everywhere. I don't remember exactly the different types but there may have been spark gaps, gas tube and MOV surge arresters along with zener diode voltage clamping circuitry. I've installed some solid state surge arresters on phone lines that were solid state but not MOV. I'd have to look it up but I seem to recall PPTC in the description. Crap, I'll have to look it up. o_O

[8~{} Uncle Surge Monster