[JohnZ]

Surge protectors, even a whole-house unit, provides minimal protection from direct or very close lightning strikes. It's like spitting in a pond a watching for the water to rise. Whole-house surge protectors with a good maximum rating of say 20,000 volts is not going to provide protection from a millisecond strike of well over a million volts. The best protection is a well grounded lightning rod (better yet ...several) and even THAT is often defeated. And here's another thing.....if you've got printer/fax machine and it's plugged into a phone jack.....and that device is connected to your computer....a surge protector won't help you there if there's a direct lightning strike on a phone line. Same goes for coaxial cable to your TV or computer modem. Whole-house protectors do no good there. But since our utilities are underground......we've got reasonably good protection....so cross your fingers and hope. Again, the main (if not only) value of surge protectors is protection from common line voltage spikes from our power provider....not lightning....regardless of what the purveyors of surge protection equipment may tell you to sell their wares.

I once worked on a U.S. Corps of Engineers Supefund project in Old Forge, PA....on a cleared mountain top. Our weather station tower (for wind direction and velocity) that we relied on in case of a dangerous chemical vapor leak kept getting hit by lightning (once when I was on the tower replacing a PC board...interesting story there). After the loss of 3 computers, 2 gas chromatograph mass spec instruments ($100K), our engineering gear-heads tried ALL kinds of high-end surge protection and grounding cures. No success.....that electrical surge just liked to zip down the coax right to our base station.....millions of volts to the zap. We eventually fixed the problem by going to RF for data transfer and eliminated the cable entirely. I learned a lot about lightning on that project.

Bottom Line: If lightning zaps your phone, cable or power line....even with surge protection.....any plugged-in devices are gonna fry. No kidding. Your best bet...unplug.