[villagetinker]

Originally Posted by Malsua

It is important to understand that the rating on the SPD is important and that a blended approach to surge protection is useful.

First off, having something is very important, specially here in the Lightning capital of the world. Congratulations, you're there.

Second, having point of use surge protection is also useful even with a whole house SPD, hence surge strips for computers and other sensitive devices.

Finally The quality of the surge is important. The amount of joules it can handle and how fast it handles them do matter.

The meter based SPD tend to be fairly permissive, where as a high quality stage 2 in the panel might stop it.

I would research the devices you've got installed and see if they are good quality or "builder grade"(i.e. cheapo).

For the record, I own two homes here in TV, one has the Eaton CHSPT2ULTRA, on SECO, the other has the Duke provided meter based surge.

6 weeks or so ago, the home with the meter based SPD had a surge. It blew out 3 light kits in 3 brand new ceiling fans, the newish(3 YO) Hunter irrigation controller, my router and my cable modem. It also killed two power line ethernet devices(sends network over your electrical outlets) and one surveillance camera.

Both the router and cable modem were plugged into a UPS. Yeah, you know, that thing that's supposed to be the final protection? It didn't stop any of it. All in, it cost me around 2k to fix everything.

I guess my point is, you can't have enough.

There was a realtor in my 2nd home at the time(we're selling that one), she said the lights got brighter and then went out. It seems like a slow burn didn't trigger any of the protection.

You are correct, the SURGE devices are specifically for surges 100's of volts microsecond rise times and very short duration. Since it was reported the "lights got bright" I suspect something happened on the utility side to cause a high (overvoltage) condition that lasted several seconds and the devices that failed could not withstand this condition. I do find it interesting that the UPS allowed the connected devices to fail. I would be interested in the brand as I have 2 protecting a multi thousand sew machine and the another for computer equipment.