Whole house surge protector legit?

[P10crew]

Jay you don't want to let the surge get into your house. Your power company should be making a robust attempt at capturing primary transients before it gets to your pole mount or pad mount transformer. Seldom will they ever give you transformer secondary protection. Barring secondary transformer transient protection this is the absolute best you can do. These keep it out of your house and are super robust. Many manufactures make them and around here the power company will sell you one and install it for free.

 

[P10crew]

One major note on this too is that for any transient protective device to control the excursion it must shunt to your ground system. When they installed mine they were happy to disconnect my pole ground and megger it to earth. This meggering gives them a resistance value from your pole ground to earth. If the resistance is out of range they will drive a second or third earthing rod. Mine was very low resistance to ground as my service pole is new and they butt wrapped the H out of it before setting the pole.ill post a pic of a butt wrap if I can find one.

 

[P10crew]

This is a very poor example of a butt wrap but you can get the gist.

 

[SubieRubyRoo]

Originally Posted by jayjr1105

My area just requires a single rod near the meter outside with #6 solid copper. On top of that a #8 is required to the incoming water line.

Best of luck to you. If you think the minimum code will protect against a direct strike, I'd be happy to be your electronics salesman when you need it. I used to install Dish and DirecTV and code is #10 solid. I had a service call at a house where the ground wire was run about 10" away from the RG6, which was run outside the house yet directly over a receptacle/Romex inside the wall. Lightning hit the dish, and while the charge was traveling down the #10 (which it melted), the charge then jumped the 10" and vaporized the copper in the RG6, and burned a hole through the wall and jumped to the ground circuit of the receptacle. And it ruined the Romex from the receptacle to the breaker panel, and ruined the breaker itself as well. I'm willing to bet a larger ground wire connected directly to a good earth ground would have prevented the jump to the RG6 and receptacle. But hey, it met code.

 

[P10crew]

Suby I can tell you from first hand experience that only full station class arresters are capable of stopping a direct strike.and even then its iffy. I've seen 500,000 pound 2 million dollar transformers with every single state of the art transient protection completely trashed with one single strike. Part of our acceptance testing is impulse strikes at 5 times the rated winding insulation rating . I've witnessed 750 kv impulse withstand testing but. A close heavy lightning strike can still trash the protection. No matter what you install at or near your house service is no match for a close heavy strike.