The last 20 years of Home Power Have Been Amazing

BTW, all the reading I've read about surge protection agrees with @jea48 .  Perhaps the most in depth explanations happen from the blogs at ZeroSurge or Brickwall.   As makers of series mode protectors (like Furman with SMP) they point out, correctly, that for shunt protection distance matters and that small amounts of resistance and / or inductance per foot can add up to significant drop in effectiveness.  The impedance per foot causes a voltage rise per foot that remains at the appliance terminals.

The distance/voltage rise arguments against shunt type protection mostly go away when we think of a panel mounted device though.  The panel is exactly the right place to put one.  However they will perform better with lightning type surges when mounted as close to the line / master breaker as possible and with the shortest, roundest possible leads which AFAIK is what the installation documents recommend even if they don't go into as much detail.

Every severe strike is different, and there are no guarantees so at best we are playing with probabilities.  Even if you do everything right with the whole house unit a point of use surge protector is still recommended.

* Correction:

For high rise time currents a short, straight wire is ideal, but if you can’t have that then avoiding sharp bends altogether is your next best alternative. That’s what I meant to say. In some photographs you can actually see evidence of a surge current jumping around a bent wire, evidence that the impedance was high enough to raise the voltage enough to jump.

@erik_squires Thx for your blog post about the EverStar MI-300 Ethernet Galvanic Isolator. If we do it for electricity makes sense to do it for ethernet too. 

Thx for your blog post about the EverStar MI-300 Ethernet Galvanic Isolator. If we do it for electricity makes sense to do it for ethernet too.

You are welcome, @wsrrsw - The year I moved in we had lightning strike near the Internet providers little ground box taking out several cable modems. Fortunately for all my neighbors they don’t even own an Ethernet cable and were 100% Wifi so only the Internet provider’s equipment was damaged, but it was close. You’ll find many stories of lightning surges coming through and zapping several pieces of AV equipment at once. Often though it’s not even visible, or it "only" damaged the Ethernet ports... meaning the gear was useless and had to be replaced.

While the damage is rare, and minor it is also expensive when it occurs. Especially bad for IT workers and audiophiles who like to connect as much as possible via wired network connections.