Surge protector/conditioner for vintage system

Man whose car got swallowed by a sinkhole bemoans the inefficacy of seat belts and air bags.

Translation: No surge protector is perfect, or can handle a direct strike but 90% of equipment damaging surges are survivable with a decent protector.

I’m near Hilton Head and as I was typing this I literally lost power, my UPS kicked in and my HT lived through another set of adverse power events. On average I live through a dozen such events a year that I know of, and probably several I do not.  I can't imagine going naked when it comes to the incoming AC power.

There are only a two serious options to protect your system.

1. Insurance

2. Dedicated Solar Power with battery storage or floated batteries on mains power   using an inverter.

Although I live in a high lighting strike area, almost everything in my house was blown up by the Electric Company when they put 220v on my neutral and fed the whole road with 440v.

Almost $10k of damage to A/C units, TVs, fridges only things that survived were electric oven and hob and LED lighting.

Still fighting for a settlement even though they admitted fault.

Lucky most of my Hi-End gear was at another house.

Thanks so much for the suggestion---I'll check it out!

Op

Please investigate Inakustic 3500P power conditioner.  Great German engineering.  I have had mine and love it.  I am getting a whole new system so I am going to upgrade to the 4500P.  Send me a private email if you are interested or want more information.  

I'm using a balanced power conditioner with surge protection. As far as I know, the different brands available due not limit current. They are not regenerators but they separate the hot, neutral and ground to remove incoming noise.

Of course, your level of concern may vary by state.  Living in SC and having survived several nearby lightning strikes that took out cellular and Internet infrastructure I'm absolutely paranoid about surge protection.  🤣

Also, I'm poor so I shudder to think of having to replace my integrated amp or DAC.

Just buy a whole house surge protector and have an electrician install it for you, and then forget about it.

Hey @wspohn - As the National Electric Code and whole house surge protector makers say, a whole house surge protector is not meant to replace point of use (i.e. surge protectors/strips) devices.

In particular, the whole house units have much higher let-through voltages than a good plug in surge strip from Furman or TrippLite.

The whole house units are there to prevent fires, and try to improve the longevity of hard wired devices.

They all recommend a belt AND suspenders approach.

Just buy a whole house surge protector and have an electrician install it for you, and then forget about it.

Great article--thank you!

This comes up a lot... and I wrote about it here:

https://inatinear.blogspot.com/2021/09/time-for-new-surge-suppression.html

No difference between a vintange and a modern system as far as need for ready current.

NEVER use a surge protector on an amp.  they limit current flow.

If you can't swing a $5k regnerator, then plug directly into a wall.  Unplug when storms come.

"Conditioners" are often filters that try to filer out the noise and they also limit current.  

as you can see I'm very skeptical about power products, with good reason, there are many bad ones out there.  There are a few good ones.  I settled long ago on the PSA PP10.  I haven't tried others but I've talked to others who have and there are a lot more failure stories than successes.  Unfortunately there are good reviews of all the bad ones.  Hard to do the research.  

Best of luck.

Jerry