Northern Virginia Surge Protectors

What Is a Whole-House Surge Protector?

A whole-house surge protector is a device that protects your entire property’s electrical system. Installed directly on your home’s main electrical panel, it detects sudden voltage increases, known as power surges. It redirects that excess energy to the grounding system. This process prevents the surge from traveling into your home’s electrical circuits, thus safeguarding your appliances, electronics, and wiring from potential damage.

Power surges can happen for many reasons, such as lightning strikes, utility issues, or even equipment failures within your home. Without surge protection, these surges can cause significant harm to sensitive devices like computers, TVs, refrigerators, and HVAC systems. A whole-house surge protector helps prevent this by stopping excess voltage before it can cause damage.

How Whole-Home Differs from Point-of-Use Surge Protectors

While point-of-use surge protectors (such as power strips) offer protection for specific devices, they only safeguard the equipment plugged directly into them. These smaller surge protectors are limited in scope and won’t protect your entire home or business from a large surge.

In contrast, a whole-house surge protector covers your electrical system. It’s installed at the main electrical panel, shielding every outlet, appliance, and device connected to your home’s electrical network. This protection ensures that even devices not plugged into a point-of-use protector are shielded from potential damage.

Why You Need Surge Protection for Your Home

Electrical surges can occur without warning, and when they do, they can cause severe damage to your home’s electrical system, appliances, and electronics. These sudden spikes in voltage can come from several sources, making it crucial to protect your home.

Common causes of power surges include:

• Lightning strikes: A direct lightning strike or even a nearby one can send a surge of electricity through power lines, affecting everything connected to your home’s electrical system.
• Power outages and restorations: When the power comes back on after an outage, the sudden rush of electricity can cause a surge that damages sensitive devices.
• Faulty wiring: Older or poorly maintained electrical wiring can result in surges, especially during periods of high demand or when appliances are turned on and off.
• Issues from local power companies: Problems within the local utility grid, such as sudden voltage changes or equipment malfunctions, can lead to surges that travel into your home.

Potential Damage from Power Surges

When a power surge occurs, it can wreak havoc on your home’s electrical system. Sensitive devices like computers, TVs, refrigerators, and even HVAC systems can be damaged or destroyed by the excess voltage. Surges can overheat electrical components, degrade internal wiring, and cause immediate failure of expensive electronics. In some cases, power surges may also result in data loss, leaving you with nothing but the cost of repair or replacement.

Even if a surge doesn’t immediately destroy your devices, repeated exposure to small surges can shorten their lifespan. Worse, many people don’t even realize they’ve suffered damage until their equipment suddenly stops working.

Benefits of Whole-House Surge Protection

Investing in whole-house surge protection is an easy and effective way to protect your home from these unpredictable electrical events. You cover all your electrical systems under one installation with a whole-house surge protector. This comprehensive solution saves you the hassle of worrying about individual power strips.

How We Install Whole-House Surge Protectors

Protecting your home’s electrical system from damaging power surges is critical. That’s why our surge protector installation process is thorough.

From start to finish, we handle surge protection installation as follows:

• Initial assessment: Our technicians will inspect your electrical panel to check its compatibility with a whole-house surge protector. We’ll also assess potential surge risks to install the proper protection for your needs.
• Professional installation: Our team will carefully install the surge protector at your main electrical panel once we've completed the assessment.
• Testing and quality check: We will thoroughly test to verify that everything works after installation. This step confirms that your whole-house surge protector is operational and ready to protect your home from potential surges.