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School me on surge suppression/power conditioning

Long time lurker off and on, new member. 

I moved to a rural area in north idaho that sees some surges(flickering lights) now and then plus some quick outages that last a few seconds to minutes to hours to days. Our area has all underground power and we have the big green transformer 350 feet away from our house down the driveway. Meter is outside the house on a pole that feeds 3 separate buildings. Our pump house, the stand alone garage, house.

 

Before i install my old school deftech powered towers and center along with my parasound hca1205 and Yamaha 3080 reciever id like to do some things to prevent damage to this equipment. I dont have a lot of money, and it IS a triple wide MH. So no room left in the inside breaker panel with it full of tandems and quads already. Thinking number #1 is a panel mounted surge suppression at the outside meter/mains shut-off to the 3 buildings. Im comfortable inside a breaker panel unless its pulling the meter. Each building also has its own breaker panel with main lug panel but too are also full since they chose the smallest panels.

Ive been reading, and definitely overwhelmed and confused. Ive got maybe a $500 budget for now. Just had to replace my heatpump ($6k)and have backup heat(woodstove $10k) installed so im kinda tapped for a few months. 

budgetav
erik_squires
17,542 posts
 

Comes up so often I wrote about it in blog posts:

 

https://speakermakersjourney.blogspot.com/2023/10/time-for-new-surge-suppression.html

 

https://speakermakersjourney.blogspot.com/2024/05/whole-house-surge-protectors-are-not.html

budgetav OP
9 posts
 

The problem with wirecitters review is its more of an infomercial for furman than anything. Going down the rabbit hole of online forums for this topic has led me to be skeptical of Wirecutter 

mark200mph
841 posts
 

Furman and panamax have been great for me if your looking budget. I have used the it 20 I but there price is high.have been through many power outages and survived.a sometimes you can find a sale on ebay or Amazon or openbox on crutchfield. Good luck and enjoy the hunt.power surge protector are a must.

052rc
78 posts
 

Power products can be risky. You never know what's going to happen until you plug them into your system and listen for yourself. The differences you hear can be big, small or nothing. And if there are differences, they're not always improvements. I would call The Cable Company. They specialize in keeping demo units of everything they sell. They'll send you a box with 4 or 5 options to try. Then you know for certain. 2 people can have very different experiences with the same exact product. 

budgetav OP
9 posts
 

052rc, thats interesting, I'll look into it. Im looking for protection for my budget equipment not looking for improvement in sound unless it just happens. Im a heavy diesel mechanic (10 years)after spending almost 10 years in a body shop, so my ears are definitely not what they used to be.

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