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

[qsrvbas@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

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