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  1.  Home
  2. PCTECH
  3. October 2006

Whole-house surge suppressors ( was Re: Home office design )

Carmen Nuland wrote:

   3. Re: Home office design (Carmen Nuland)
I have to agree about the outlets ... You can never have too many. Our home office is set up with two sets of 4-plex on the one wall where the computer desk was going to be. I really would like to have a UPS system, but for now 
I'm just using individual surge protectors.  Make sure you have all the
wires you think you'll need run through the walls before the drywall is on. I would have liked to have CAT installed to a couple of other rooms in the 
house - not just the office, but it sounds like too much work now.
Outlets! More outlets! And cable everywhere! However, I have been successfully using both wireless and home-powerline networking in my 3-story (2-story plus daylight basement) home for a couple years. Since it wasn't pre-cabled, it was an easy choice to try. And it's been reasonable to stay with since I'm a few hundred feet from even the closest other house. Being at the end of a sparsely populated, private gravel road with forest for quite a ways on all other sides has some advantages.
For powerline networking, I started testing with Phonex units, but they didn't survive long. I've switched to Airlinks and survival rates have been excellent. 


Not just home office design, but general house...


And that brings me to my interest in this --
Our local co-op power company started offering "whole house" surge suppressors a couple years ago. Can't quite recall, but a couple hundred bucks or so, installed as a replacement meter outside of the house. We went with it and have been satisfied since, I suppose. That is, nothing's gone wrong as far as 'power surges' go.
But it's long been advised _not_ to use surge suppressors in sequence due to some kind of feedback that could get started. I do use a number of them in-house in power strips and haven't had a problem since getting the 'whole house' unit. The IBM PS/2s we used to use had some kind of surge suppressors builtin; the user manuals actually warned that plugging them in to a surge suppressor power strip could void the warranty. 

Does anybody else have experience with 'whole house' units?
I expect mine to provide some protection from outside utility surges. In-house, there's still always a chance of creating a surge. 

Tom Liotta

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