Quote from: A.Delaney on January 26, 2018, 05:12:10 AM

Anyone have an opinion on these?

You are asking for a magic box solution. You are not doing what is always necessary to have any honest answers - the whys.

Lightning is an electrical current that 3 miles of sky cannot block. How do a millimeters gap in that magic box stop what three miles of sky cannot?

More numbers. Destructive surges occur in microseconds. At best, that magic box cannot respond any faster than 10 milliseconds - and probably requires much longer.

Anyone can learn from what has existed and is proven by over 100 years. Your telco CO suffers about 100 surge with each storm. How often has your town been without phone service for four days (after every storm) while they replace that $multi-million computer?

Obviously, direct lightning strikes without damage is routine in facilities that cannot have damage. Plug-in magic boxes are not used to make surge damage easier.

View your own CO. View incoming phone wires. Notice how all wires go underground long before entering that CO. Because surge protection is distant from electronics (up to 50 meters) and as close as possible to earth ground. No protector (or magic box) does protection - not one. Effective protectors are connecting devices to what does the protection. Protection is where hundreds of thousands of joules are harmlessly absorbed.

You must confirm your earth ground is a single point earth ground. That is THE most critical component of a protection 'system'. Best protectors connect low impedance (ie less than 10 feet) to that ground. Wall receptacle safety ground clearly is not earth ground. Protection is about where hundreds of thousands of joules are absorbed - harmlessly outside. Then no current is inside hunting for earth destructively via all appliances.

'Whole house' protectors come from companies known by any guy for integrity. Lightning can be 20,000 amps. So these minimal protectors are 50,000 amps. A protector must not fail for decades after many direct lightning strikes. This best solution also costs tens of times less money - about $1 per protected appliance.

Protection is always - as in always - about where hundreds of thousands of joules dissipate. Protection means a surge current is nowhere inside a building. A protector is only as effective as its earth ground.