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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
celtic66
1,935 posts
 

Have run through an embarrassing number of conditioners to include several Furman products.  They work.  

Puritan Labs 156.  Done!  Enjoy your long journey......or take the short cut.  Be well.

budgetav OP
9 posts
 

Like i said, I'm looking for surge protection, not power conditioning. The utilities wont install a type 1 at the meter, in fact they never heard of such a thing(crazy right). So I'll be installing a panel based one myself at the outdoor panel and another in the house panel if i can get room

celtic66
1,935 posts
 

Your OP: School me on surge suppression/power conditioning

So, changing gears Environmental Potentials makes a terrific surge protector external to your panel.  Good hunting.

erik_squires
17,543 posts
 

I've not been impressed with the quality of topics or rigor coming out of headphonesty , by the way.  A couple of bullshit click bait articles flew across my news feed a while ago and I blocked that site completely.  Do as you will. 

erik_squires
17,543 posts
 

Like i said, I'm looking for surge protection, not power conditioning. The utilities wont install a type 1 at the meter, in fact they never heard of such a thing(crazy right). So I'll be installing a panel based one myself at the outdoor panel and another in the house panel if i can get room

 

You absolutely should, but for sensitive devices a protector at the outlet is important.  The panel / meter mounted protectors have relatively high let through/clamping voltages by comparison

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