Champaign, IL Surge Protector Installation
Picture the scene: the noise of thunder and dazzling lightning strikes hit your Illinois neighborhood on a dark, stormy evening. You soon discover many of your home appliances have become fried, including your computers and other electronics. Within seconds, this storm has caused thousands of dollars worth of damage.
All of this is avoidable with a professionally installed whole-house surge protector. This system could prevent costly damage to your appliances from power surges during storms.
What Are Power Surges?
You may notice a power surge occur from time to time. Often, these surges are minor and cause no sign of damage. Sometimes, however, these can cause damage to electrical appliances, causing them to fail down the line. A manufacturer warranty doesn’t usually cover surges, so it could get expensive to replace your equipment.
A power surge is an unexpected rise in the voltage flowing through electrical equipment that exceeds the standard voltage level.
Various factors can cause a power surge, such as a problem with cables or a wire, manufacturer errors with the electrical circuit design, or one of your devices, such as tools with electric motors drawing too much power. Surges can also take place during extreme weather events, such as storms or a flood.
A power surge can damage sensitive electronics like computers but also other equipment not powered by batteries. Anything connected to your system at the time is at risk.
The increased voltages can cause the metal wire inside a cable or electrical components to start heating up to a very high temperature. This heating can lead to burnout, shortening your electrical equipment’s lifespan.
What Is a Surge Protector?
Surge protectors are devices designed to protect your electrical equipment against an oversupply of power. They place controls over the voltage flowing through a circuit so that the electrical flow doesn’t get too high.
Regardless of the manufacturer, these systems have the same basic equipment inside them: a metal oxide varistor, or MOV, that diverts excess power.
The way it works is that the device ensures a cable that has received too much energy and has got too hot can begin cooling—the protectors are explosion-proof by design. They prevent this overheating from occurring. The MOV connects to your ground earth line at a conduit via semiconductors, which have a variable resistance so that they can adjust the flow of electrons depending on the voltage.
Surge protectors are more than just a power strip. The latter are power supplies plugged into a wall socket when you don’t have enough outlets for your electronics or tools or when the cord length won’t reach the power source in the wall.
Instead, a manufacturer will design surge protectors to have additional features to control the voltage which standard power strips don’t include.
How Does Whole-House Surge Protection Work?
Increasing numbers of people are choosing to install a whole-house surge protector for their homes. These are the most wide-ranging form of surge protectors, as they cover entire electric systems and circuits.
A whole-house surge protector is a single system that connects up to your circuit board and blocks the flow of excess current or shorting it to ground.
Sometimes, a surge from a single device in your home can compromise and damage other devices simultaneously. Whole-house protection evenly distributes current across all the appliances in your home at all times.
Having protection across your entire home means you don’t have to choose which of your electrical devices you want to have protected due to a limited number of surge-protected outlets. Plugging them in anywhere in your house will now guarantee their protection.
Your whole house will now have protection against surges caused by extreme weather events, such as lightning, as well as surges caused by faulty wires or by individual appliances.
Schedule Your Champaign Whole-House Surge Protector Installation Today!
Surge protection can protect equipment in your home, and a whole-house surge protector could save you thousands of dollars down the line.
We have years of experience installing surge protectors for both commercial and residential markets in Illinois. Call today for a no-effort solution to surge protector installation. We install these systems for clients throughout Illinois, from Washington to Champaign.
For additional information, please contact us at 217-290-9130, or visit our website for more information about Edelman and the other electrical engineering services we offer.
Don’t hesitate—contact us today!