I did a bit of research on this when I lost my TV, surround sound, Roku, and PS3 in a pretty darn mild storm a few years ago.haltz wrote: ↑August 10 21, 9:37 pmI have a random electronics question. Maybe this can be a catch-all for quick questions about a variety of topics. I'm pretty sure we've had a thread like this before but I can't find it.
There was a storm this afternoon, and I got an alert on my phone that my cameras were out and came home to find the router and modem dead and then was informed that one of two printers in the basement was fried. No breakers were tripped, I'm pretty sure the power never went out but not positive, and everything was on surge protectors that also didn't trip. There were other electronics that made it through fine.
Tried plugging the three things that died into other outlets, changing power cords etc. I took the modem back to charter and they gave me a new one and then I created a new network using one of the other surviving wifi points as the hub, but now I have these two relatively expensive pieces of equipment that seem completely shot.
What happened?
It's entirely possible your surge protector was no longer doing any actual protecting. Most cheap commercial surge protectors are trash and should only be used to protect stuff you really don't care about that much. Moving up into a higher-quality surge protector is a smart play for expensive things. There are certain characteristics to consider when picking one out. To me, there's three main ones -
1: Clamping voltage - Essentially, how many volts are you willing to accept before the surge protection kicks in?
2: Joule Rating - How much damage can this bad boy take before failing? Also, make sure the rating is based on the individual resistors and not a series of resistors added up to give the rating. For instance three 300 volt resistors in series do not actually provide 900 volts of protection.
3: Fail safe mode - a lot of surge protectors still provide power even after the resistors are destroyed. Sure, they have a bright red LED telling you to buy a new one but a lot of times it's way too late by then
My personal recommendation is the APC SurgeArrest Performance surge protectors. I have one for all my living room equipment and one for my PC and equipment. There's several other good ones, Eaton and Schneider Electric make good ones if I'm remembering right.
