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

Hey Tom:

When I lived in NJ, my electrician installed a whole house surge thingy in
the breaker box.  I never had any problems, but I don't recall any lightning
strikes.

I'm interested in your power line networking.  I live in the middle of
nowhere, and I sometimes get mad at speed of wireless.  Since I bought a
spec home here, I didn't get a chance to run cables everywhere.

My Electric Co Op is beta testing Broadband over power lines.  Since I'm
stuck with satellite here, I pray they let me have it.  They said I might be
able to participate in spring 2007

Art Tostaine

On 10/12/06, qsrvbas@xxxxxxxxxxxx <qsrvbas@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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

--
Tom Liotta
The PowerTech Group, Inc.
19426 68th Avenue South
Kent, WA 98032
Phone  253-872-7788 x313
       253-479-1416
Fax    253-872-7904
http://www.powertech.com

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