If you get wild voltage fluctuations, a good power conditioner/regenerator that can step up or down the voltage as needed might be useful. They are crazy expensive though. @ValentineLuke linked one that seems pretty good. That UltraLink thingy won’t do that.
If you get noise beyond what a good filtering strip (like the one I linked) can eliminate, then I would suggest you hire an electrician. Something is F’d up in your house. Don’t bother with an isolation transformer because the real ones are 4 or 5 Focal Utopia’s MSRP in price.
Oh, and don’t run your air-conditioning / refrigerator / garage door on the same circuit as your audio gear.
OMG look at the price of those things. I don’t think I will get a $7,000 improvement in listening experience so may have to pass on those power plant options.
@Hacksaw, I’d go with this one if you want a MOV-based surge protector. It’s half the price of the other Tripp Lite, has more room for large plugs and it came first in the Wirecutter surge protector review.
If you read that Wirecutter article, you’ll see that it recommends that you replace a MOV-based surge protector every 2-5 years depending on the quality of your electricity because the protection components wear out, and there’s no way for you to know if it’s still working or not.
The Zero Surge that I bought is not value for money at all since it’s 6 times the price of the Tripp Lite but I bought it for peace of mind, knowing I can set it and forget it. As long as you trust yourself to replace it on a regular basis, the Tripp Lite is the better buy.
Where I live, which is the lightning capital of the US, I went with a whole house surge solution. A Environmental Potentials EP-2050 Wave-Form Regenerator & Surge Suppression on main house panel direct off the main & EP2750 Ground Filters on sub-panel and main panel feed. I think a lot "products " on the market directed at audio are over priced. They / some might work great but look into products made by power companies that actually do this for a living. I always look at what is the first point of entry when power and noise are concerned and work to resolve that at the first point which is the power companies entry into your home and how your home is grounded… OF course people that live in apartments and high raise building are pretty much stuck with what they got and need to use battery backup and surge protection to reduce surge and noise.
Thank you for all the advice. I am shocked that I didn’t know surge protectors fail with age, and when they fail they no longer protect. I have always assumed they would fail open. Egg on my face now.
Nothing last forever and when power comes into play and lightning its always best to verify the product. My unit was installed by the electrician so they do an inspection once a year.
Some units have a light so it’s easy to check if it needs to be replaced.
It’s one of these things where manufacturers don’t want you to know the whole story.
In terms of lightning protection, nothing besides equipment installed by the power company (or at the power entry) will work. If lightning hits such that it makes it into your house wiring no “surge protector” will defend from that. It will just burn up with the rest of your equipment.
Surge suppressors can help with minor power ‘spikes’.
I consider it a “living where there’s a lot of lightning” tax. I wind up replacing fried cable modem / router about once a year. It’s cheaper than trying to defend against lightning.
So very true on the lighting, nothing a person can do to stop a direct hit or a nearby hit if it gets into your home. Just be sure you have additional insurance on your stuff. As homeowners insurance will depreciate your stuff down to the pennies.
Yeah, I get that once every couple years. I assumed it came in from the telephone line which I did not have protected. Are you saying even the surge protector will not protect equipment from a lightning strike ?
Man, I hate insurance companies. They do everything possible to avoid actually providing coverage.
If you have a claim and don’t report it right away they deny for delaying. If you report it right away but wait for them to respond, they deny the claim due to “neglect”. Hate them a lot.
correct. Nothing will stop a direct hit. NOTHING. Phone lines, cable TV lines, Power Company AC wiring, Air Conditioning external to internal wiring , it gets in.
If you make too many claims, they put you on a black list. That happened to me when I made 3 claims in the same year, for things that were out of our control (like storm damage to my roof), not knowing there were secret rules I had to follow. My father in law was our insurance agent and got a memo to drop us, and had to appeal to head office. We had to agree to raise our rates and not make any more claims for a while. My father in law said that was still better than being dropped because the black list gets shared with other insurance companies, even though I’m sure that can’t be legal.
Insurance is such an underhanded racket. You pay these large premiums each year and never make a claim and then one day, you have to and they give you a ration of crap. And then threaten to drop you. You almost have to get an attorney to get things resolved.
The financial collapse of 2008 is commonly blamed on the mortgage lenders, as told by the media.
What actually enabled the collapse was insurance companies (mainly AIG) writing so many mortgage insurance policies that they couldn’t make good on them.
Without mortgage insurance none of those 2-million dollar mortgages would have been granted to guys working part-time at McD’s.
Insurance is for catastrophic loss. If I had a $2000 claim, after my deductible, I’d net $1000. Better to just eat the small losses. I was renting a tri-level house in the 90s working a job for a couple of years in Northern California (where I had no intention of staying) and the refrigerator ice maker line split and made a huge mess and flooded out the lower floor. Filed a renters insurance claim to reimburse the landlord for the repair cost to the wood floor. When I bought homeowners insurance a couple of years later, I got dinged for the two year old claim, and had to pay a higher rate.
I had a lightning ground strike on my property (small desert town of Apple Valley, CA) in the late 80s. Took out most of my gear. Back then there were actually businesses who repaired things…
