Electric Panel Surge protection

a whole house surge unit is not a complete solution.

This is backed up by the  wording of the National Electric Code, as well as the fine print in the publication of most reputable whole house surge protectors.  It gets lost in translation when electricians are selling them on their websites.   They'll say "protects your whole house!" but not give you the details, making you think your PC and TV are good when they aren't.

Important to note that no surge protector guarantees survival from a catastrophic surge strike, but 99% of damaging surges are the one’s you wouldn’t know hit anyway.  In my area we get 2 power events a month, sometimes storm, sometimes unfortunate interaction of a power pole and a vehicle, sometimes just power company failures.  I don’t know when they will happen, I can’t proactively disconnect my system so I chose to use multiple layers of surge protection all the time. 

BTW,  the patents on series mode protection expired a while ago and Furman among others now incorporates them into their designs.  Looking at the only 3rd party tests I know of, from Wired, the latest Furman and Tripp Lite models outperform Brickwall and ZeroSurge and also add nice additional features. 

Not exactly directly related, but I just spent $1,000 to find out that my air handler (the thing that moves air in my vents) uses a computer controlled blower motor, which is much more vulnerable to electric surges than your old school AC motor.  It is this kind of computerization of every appliance that makes whole house units more necessary. 

Not all surges are from lightning.  I've mentioned it before, but I had a customer situation where only room-local protection was in place.  A number of system-specific UPS's gave up magic smoke when a storm-tossed tree limb dropped a 4160V line on the 120/240 V areial lines below it and fed the 4160 into a bunch of local buildings.  Odds may be lower, but the same can happen when a car takes out a pole on an otherwise quiet sunny day.  Public Utility power is usually pretty good, but is seldom perfect, even if your service drop to the house is underground like mine, and I still use both panel and in-room protection.  

Some years ago the house adjacent to mine was struck by lightening and fortunately I had a whole house surge protector on my panel. The induction from the strike carbonized the surge protector but spared most of the electronics, some of which were plugged into their own line-level surge protection strips (I lost a few things, which I don't recall, but they were incidental). So, yes, I currently have a Siemens Boltshield FSPD14 whole house surge protector as well as individual protection units on sensitive electronics, including a Furman ELITE20 PF i on my main rig and a Brick Wall surge protector on my office system.