Audiophile Surge Suppressor (and nothing else)

@total111 The Torus products look like a pretty sound product.

@rick_n I had not heard of the Clarus, it seems decent as well, though maybe a little out of my price range when going beyond the Duet.

@zlone--I have a few observations, no single theme. When I lived in the Lower Hudson Valley (between Nyack and Piermont) our power would go out if somebody sneezed. It was just ancient infrastructure. Here in Austin, though I’m in an old house in an old neighborhood (the original part of Travis Heights), power was extremely clean despite the fact that I’m a stone’s throw from a lot of commercial stuff on South Congress and downtown Austin. New infrastructure.

However, the grid here got funky- maybe others who lived in Texas longer would tell you I’m FOS, but it seemed to get much less stable due to population growth, business growth, etc. since I started coming here in 2012.

When I bought the Travis Heights house, I not only installed whole house surge (currently, the Siemens- nice unit), but added a big iso transformer- a Controlled Power 10kVa. There was an option to add a surge board to the box (the entire unit is roughly the size of a full on refrigerator but only 1/2 as high-- big NEMA box). That is what feeds the main system.

For non-critical use, most stuff in other rooms, from the record cleaning equipment to the vintage hi-fi in the front parlor is on point of use boxes.

On the big system, I could hear the effects of these boxes and am glad to be rid of them.

I don’t know what the NEC says about having an electrician wire a raw transformer into a subsystem in your house for the hi-fi. The raw transformer should not be too spendy without a cabinet and associated audiophile jewelry. I think @terry9 went this route- doesn’t necessarily solve the surge issue but I can’t see the grid in Texas or elsewhere getting better in the future- more demand, more noisy apparatus on the lines.

I did do a full overhaul of the electrical system when I bought the Travis Heights house and when we finally added a whole house back up generator, had the house re-wired in part--main service feeds two panels- one for the generator (26kWa) which has its own breaker box (Square D). Anything wired to that panel gets generator power. The hi-fi and some other things --- I pulled about 1/2 of the breakers off the original main panel but not the feed to the iso transformer -- which does not connect with the auto transfer switch so in effect, the hi-fi has no connection to the ATS or generator (other than shared ground, I guess).

@whart   Quite right. I have two bare isolation transformers for most gear, and the main audio power supply also has it's own. The electrical inspector who came to inspect it remarked that it was the cleanest power he'd seen since working in a hydro power station.

Whart, how are you? Hope that you're well. Thanks again for publishing audio related information - a real public service.

@whart did you ever see the wind mill farms in west TX....as far as the eye can see unreliable but expensive power generation ....

@terry9 ​​@total111 --All good here. Texas is unimaginably huge- I was in touch with some folks in Denton, which is north of Fort Worth (famous for its music school, particularly jazz performance) and asked them how they fared given the hurricane/tornados that hit, among other places, Oklahoma. The response I got was that they are still three plus hours from the northern border.

Yep, West Texas (not to be confused with the town of "West" near Waco) is vast-- apart from those windmills, there are places where you see nothing but scrub in every direction as far as the eye can see.

We took a trip to go that observatory in Ft. Davis- they have several big old telescopes- got to star gaze- since there is no ambient light out there, pretty amazing.

Thanks for the kind words, Terry. Much is owed to the contributors.