Surge protectors--how many $ make sense?

@panzrwagn

I would also check out Ting - www.tingfire.com - an electrical arc fault detector.

Oh, that’s pretty cool, honestly. :) The NEC has been steadily going towards more arc fault detection in the home. They went from 1 per bedroom to 1 in every 120V circuit in the home pretty much. You can upgrade most breakers to AFCI, but none of them have the cool reporting in this unit.

I had a Furman unit with voltage readout.  That's why I ended up getting a unit with AVR.  I could see how much my voltage wavered through the day, up to 130V peaks when I was in a high rise.

Now that I'm in a home I get long term, seasonal and daily voltage swings which my PC doesn't care about, but the AVR keeps me +_ a few volts, or it shuts down. Nothing in between.

My 2015 house in the American Southwest has a breaker board that trips if you burp too loudly. So I just run two entry level Furman power strips, which occasionally trip. I had an electrician inspect my $30K system. It's all class D.  He said the amp draw was nowhere near overload.  

My 2015 house in the American Southwest has a breaker board that trips if you burp too loudly.

@incorrigable 

That's actually not a good thing.  Since you had an electrician inspect your audio system I imagine you also had the panel inspected?

I've been in this 2006 home for 4 years and the only time I've had a breaker trip was entirely my fault or during GFCI testing.

@rfagon

UL Listed is for complete products. UL Recognized (U and Reversed R) is for “recognized components” that have been subjected to testing limited by their conditions of acceptability". The individual MoVs are generally recognized since they do not have an enclosure or NEC compatible connection to the mains.

I was a UL product safety engineer and did some work on TVSS in the late 80s. Spent most of my UL engineering career testing and certifying SMPS and electrical medical devices for safety.

@rfagon Clamping voltage is a single dimensional specification, It means very little unless the clamping time is also specified. In the case of SquareD, their whole house surge protectors have a clamping time of 4-6 nanoseconds. When you consider that a single 60 Hz cycle is 175,000 times longer, you begin to understand how very effective they are in the real world. That said, the Environmental Potentials products are the real deal, and engineered (and priced) accordingly to their higher performance. The EP-HPS at $2400 isn't cheap, but their lack of pretense about their products is very appealing.