indeed Andrew don't buy one of these thinking that it will save your electrical equipment from lightning damage with insurance in mind because that's very unlikely to happen

the Tacima 6 Way Mains Conditioner and Radio Frequency Interference Filter is just that in reality and is excellent for that purpose and that purpose alone

Edited by NICK_ADSL_UK (Tue 22-Jul-14 10:32:34)

I've been very unlucky with lightning strikes over my phone line. When living at my parents' house (where they had telegraph poles in the street) we had two strikes over the years which affected equipment. Firstly, the dial-up modem in my PC got zapped (it didn't affect the rest of the PC) and then the SKY box modem was zapped (the receiver continued to work fine but had to be unplugged from the phone line as it affected voice calls).
8 weeks ago I came home after a storm (where our incoming phone wires are underground) to find our phone line was out. It was repaired in a couple of days (but cost us £160 as the previous owners had swapped the BT master socket for a poncy brass affair). It also temporarily knocked out the house alarm. When the phone line was up and running, I found we had no internet. Yes, it had killed the ADSL side of our router. Thankfully all phones lived to tell the tale (including our DECT base station which is connected via some form of phoneline surge protector which I bought after the lightning strikes on my parents' phone line).
A new (and better) wireless router is now in place so all up and running again. However, when I hear a storm now, I will be unplugging it from the phoneline if I am able to do so. I don't particularly worry about the TV... I don't know of anybody who has had their aerial hit (yet)!

In reply to a post by lenham343:

Any tips on surge protection that won't affect broadband speed?

Your telco CO, connected to buildings all over town, suffers about 100 surges per storm without damage. They never try to block a surge. Instead use another well proven technology that means direct lightning strikes without damage even to a protector. And without degrading signal bandwidth.

Protectors, adjacent to appliances, must somehow block or absorb that energy. How does a 2 cm part stop what three miles of sky could not? How does a protector rated at hundreds of joules absorb energy that is hundreds of thousands of joules? It doesn't. So they hype a mythical big buck warranty so that naive consumers will believe it does protection.

Lightning seeks earth ground. For example, a direct strike to AC wires far down a street is a direct strike to every household appliance. Are all damage? Of course not. To be damaged, an appliance must have both an incoming current path and an outgoing path to earth. A surge is electricity. Often the outgoing path is damaged (ie cable connection).

Code requires all telephone and cable to have proper protectxion. Best protection for cable is a hardwire connected low impedance (ie 'less than 10 feet') to earth ground. What was the best outgoing path via a modem? Cable. What may have been the incoming path? AC electric.

AC electric (the most common incoming path for surges) is not required to have surge protection. Maybe three wires enter. Only one connects to earth. So two other AC wires connect a surge directly to all appliances.

Unlike cable, both telephone and AC electric cannot be earthed directly by hardwire. So we do a next best thing. We make that earth connection via a protector. Since lightning may be 20,000 amps, then a 'whole house' protector should be at least 50,000 amps. Effective protection means a protector must not fail even on a direct strike. These well proven devices come from other and more responsible companies (that do not hype mythical warranties) such as General Electric, ABB, Polyphaser, Leviton, Syscom, Square D, Ditek, Intermatic, and Siemens to name but a few. An effective Cutler-Hammer solution sells in Lowes and Home Depot.

No protector does protection. Not one. Effective protectors make a low impedance (ie 'less than 10 foot') connection to single point earth ground. All four words have electrical significance. Energy is never stopped or absorbed by effective protectors. Effective protectors connect surges to what absorbs hundreds of thousands of joules. What is the most important component in any protection system? What actually does the protection? What must absorb that energy? Single point earth ground.

Protectors are simple dumb science. Earthing is an art. Only introduced is what was well understood even 100 years ago. How to make the solution better? Learn about the only component that must always exist in any protection system. That is not a protector. That is protection - earth ground.

A protector is only as effective as its earth ground. If properly installed, then even direct lightning strikes should not cause damage to any household appliance. Something that a completely different device with a same name (a plug-in protector) cannot do.

Edited by deleted (Tue 22-Jul-14 13:25:00)

Why, pray tell, would modern computing devices, particularly those that use a switch mode power supply, need mains conditioning and Radio Frequency filtration?

A surge protector would protect against anything the computer equipment couldn't already cope with, and would come with insurance (with standard caveats of course, please read the small print) against anything the surge protector failed to protect against.

Also that device you linked to includes a shielded cable to reduce the noise, and yet this is clearly before the filter that removes the noise. Another warning sign (besides being more expensive than a more functional equivalent from belkin, a company not exactly renowned for their cheap cables and electrical accessories) is that it uses psuedo-science, to justify it's use for audio visual purposes. Also a recommendation by What Hi-Fi is not exactly a ringing endorsement given audiophile equipment is never over-priced pseudo-scientific [censored].

I do have surge protection on my stuff but as has been mentioned more for the insurance.