When considering home safety, many homeowners fail to recognize the benefits of surge protectors. Yet, the United States electrical grid has proven to be increasingly unreliable in recent years, with many reports finding power quality to be at a historical low. Having your contractor install surge protection will shield your home not only from power quality problems, but also from everyday power surges.
What is Surge Protection?
As with your personal computer, surge protection for your home provides a shield from electrical surges. These are brief, high-amplitude bursts of electrical fluctuation that have the potential to harm any electrical or electronic equipment in your home. They can result from any of the following:
- Lightning strikes: These are the most visible but least common cause of power surges, and only damage from indirect lightning can be prevented.
- Utility events: These involve shifts and other phenomena in the grid and electrical equipment, against which protection will more fully shield your home.
- Internal events: These are brief surges originating within your home via appliances and HVAC equipment, especially motors. Surge protection will provide vital shielding against such events.
For each, surge protectors shield your home against surges by shunting any voltage into the ground, which makes a good ground absolutely essential.
Benefits of Installation
Without proper protection, surges can damage and destroy HVAC equipment and home appliances, no matter how often you schedule annual service calls. Yet, by simply having surge protection installed in your home, you gain inexpensive insurance against any potential electrical events. In addition, installation is relatively simple for trained technicians, who can also provide expert advice about any potential problems. It will also generally include professional installation, reliable operation, and possibly even a lifetime warranty. So be sure to consider surge protection for your Northwest Arkansas home during your next annual service call.
Adding a surge protector is an inexpensive way to maintain your HVAC equipment and keep your system running. For more expert information about maintaining your home’s heating and cooling systems, including the protective benefits of other electrical equipment like standby generators, contact Paschal Heat, Air, & Geothermal.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Springdale, Arkansas about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about surge protectors and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
479.900.0784
