On Fri, 20 May 2016 06:21:19 -0700 (PDT), trader_4
wrote:

On Friday, May 20, 2016 at 4:12:20 AM UTC-4, westom wrote:
On Thursday, May 19, 2016 at 2:44:30 PM UTC-4, wrote:
Tom sells whole house protection and you definitely need it, connected
to a good grounding electrode. The only thing Tom disagrees about is
whether a point of use protector does anything. I do believe it will
damp out locally induced shots that get into the system after it
enters the house.

We don't sell these things. We installed effective protection. Direct lightning strike without damage were routine. In one venue, all wires were underground. Since single point earthing was missing, all computers in the block house (on surge protectors) were damaged. That strike to earth was a direct strike to underground wires.

I never said plug-in protectors do nothing.

You sure have said that and far worse over the years.



Constantly stated is that it only does what it claims to do - nothing more. To protect from a type of surge that typically causes no damage; a transient made irrelevant by robust protection inside every appliance.

And so it begins. Again what you're saying is contradictory to what the
electrical engineer experts in surge protection that wrote both the NIST
and IEEE guides clearly say in those guides. Readers are encouraged to
read them. They show plug-in type surge protectors being used. Which
would of course make no sense if they are irrelevant by "robust" protection
inside every appliance. Open up those appliances and you'll find small
MOVs. Look inside a decent plug-in and you'll find ones that are many
times larger. And notice who provided the links to those guides and who
does not.

Tom is very effective in selling his Polyphaser and he dismisses point
of use protectors because he doesn't have them to sell.
My experience was built up over many years and thousands of customers
in Florida who were not going to power off their computers, ATMs and
cash registers every afternoon and unplug them. There is no single
solution. Real protection involves many layers of protection. In some
cases we went as far as to bond the cases of interconnected equipment
together with fat wire because that is what it took to minimize those
"interior transients" that Tom thinks are harmless. We also used
ferrite beads on signal wires and other methods to mitigate transients
that showed up on the load side of the service entrance.

When lightning hit the lightning rod above my weather station, it
completely bypassed anything on the service entrance ... but my PC and
the station survived.