I just picked up a whole house surge Protector (UL1449, 60Ka, Clamps at 330, ~$80)
My first question is, how do these work? I always figured you’d have to run them inline with the main power source from the meter, but that’s not how they work. It hooks right into two breakers. It seems to me that when a surge comes in it’s going to go down all the other branches as well, or does it have a way to absorb the surge.
This site has a pretty good description of the general process that’s used by most protectors.
One of the things a surge protector does is direct the “overflowing” electricity into the grounding connection. So, in this respect, they do sort of “absorb” the surge.
LilShieste
I understand how surge protectors work, I’m just fuzzy on how whole house protectors work. To me, that’s like plugging a surge protector into a duplex recepticle and expecting the other outlet to be covered as well.
It’s just not intuitive to me.
Think of it this way: Let’s assume that the water pressure coming in to your house from the city main shouldn’t exceed 60 psi, otherwise damage to your fixtures could result. So, you purchase an overpressure relief valve and install it on an unused spigot. Up to 60 psi, everything is cool. Exceed 60 psi, and the relief valve opens to let off the excess pressure.
Crude analogy? Perhaps.
But now let’s assume something odd happened and all of a sudden it went up to 3000 psi for a few nanoseconds, assuming the valve can handle and dissipate this extra load, you’re still going to blow out your pipes. Now OTOH if this valve was inline with the main water pipe for your house it would be different. When it sense anything over, say 75psi it opens up (in the ‘line’ side of the valve, and dumps the water into your basement until normal pressure is resumed (in the mean time it would still keep the water at a reasonable pressure on house side of the valve. But I guess this get’s into the realm of regulators.
The only thing I can guess is that it shorts the extra juice to ground thereby creating a path of less resistance then the various loads around the house.