Surge Protectors

your electronic equipment safe, surge protectors are recommended for all areas of the home. In case of power loss or spike or the incident that a bolt of lightning actually strikes your home, a surge protector is manufactured to protect your possessions from damage and destruction, taking the brunt of the hit internally and sparing your things.

Surge protector reviews will usually be hard to find for basic models like you will find at your nearby super store, but high end models with incredible specifications can usually be tracked down with a little work. What you’ll find is that there are basically two aspects of a power surge protector to pay attention to in rating the best one for your equipment. Both involve identification of surge protector ratings prior to purchase.

First, you want to look at the Joule rating. A Joule is a measurement of a unit of energy and is equivalent to a watt of power dissipating or radiating in one second. Be careful of what is listed on the product itself, as some companies are deceptive about their Joule ratings. You want to find a unit that provides at least 400 Joules of protection. While some may claim over 1000 Joules of surge resistance, these numbers are often inflated through different rating systems and cannot be trusted. Unfortunately, you cannot truly count on surge protectors bought at your local hardware store to rank up to these requirements, unless you are paying at least $75 for the product. Anything less is probably a hoax.

As second criteria, you’ll want to look at the availability of line conditioning, which will clean up and remove line noise with a toroidal choke coil, an electromagnetic device found in most commercial grade surge protectors. You can also count on better quality from a model that incorporates coaxial, satellite, and phone jacks into its protection so that you can protect all your electronic devices as opposed to just those with AC plugs.

While you’ll find units that will work for most electronics at Radio Shack or Walmart for a cost as low as $10, you’ll want to carefully read all the specifications and determine which one includes the optimum surge protection for your electronics. This could mean spending more money, but an extra $50 is worth saving thousands of dollars of electronic equipment in your home.