Learn how whole home surge protection can save your home and valuable electronics from electrical disaster and how iTrust Home Services can help you with you whole home surge protection needs. You may not realize just how important whole home surge protection is. After all, you do use power strips with built-in surge protectors and you have circuit breakers in your electrical panel, right? Well, although those are a very small start, those things cannot protect your house and belongings in the way whole home surge protection can. Therefore, we are going to share valuable information about whole home surge protection, how it works and how beneficial it can be in protecting your biggest investment; your home.

What Is Whole Home Surge Protection?

Whole home surge protection is a means of protecting your home from different types of power surges, many of which, you have no control over. Simply put, whole home surge protection is an electrical safety component that is hard wired into your home’s electrical service panel as well as any subpanels you may have in your home or an out building. Meaning, a licensed electrician must determine the size of the surge protector needed as well as handling the complicated installation. Whole home surge protection is an important electrical safety feature which protects your entire home’s electrical service, including all outlets, your appliances and electronics from high voltage electrical surges.

How Does Whole Home Surge Protection Work?

Whole home surge protection works by detecting electrical voltage spikes and either blocking that excess flow of electricity or rerouting it out of your electrical system and into the ground. For example, during a storm, your telecommunications line is struck by lightning. The high voltage travels through those lines, destroying every electrical outlet and device connected to that line. You now have lost your telephone lines, your telephones and maybe even your cable box, modem and Wi-Fi connection, depending on who your carrier is. What whole home surge protection does is detect that electrical surge, contain and reroute it safely into the ground and out of your home, saving you a great deal of time and money in repairs and the replacement of equipment.

What Does Whole Home Surge Protection Protect My Home From?

As mentioned above, whole home surge protection offers your home protection from power surges from a variety of sources from outside and inside your home. The sources of power surges come from:

Lightning strikes
Power outages caused by downed power lines, poles etc.
Tripped circuit breakers from overloads within the home
Short circuits from appliances and other large electrical components
Power transitions in other large equipment connected to the same line
Malfunctions caused by the power company
Electromagnetic pulses generated by storms
Inductive spikes caused from a sudden cut off of an electrical appliance

So, as you can see, any type of electrical surge that can come from inside or outside of your home can be stopped by the addition of whole home surge protection.

The Importance of Whole Home Surge Protection

Now that you understand what whole home surge protection is, how it works and what it protects your house from, let’s take a look at the probability of those damaging surges happening to you and what it can do to your home and belongings. A great example comes from an article on the This Old House website. It says: “Not long ago, electrical contractor Allen Gallant was about halfway through the job of completely rewiring a 3,200-square-foot house in Acton, Massachusetts, when the owners decided to save some money and not install whole house surge protection against surges from lightning or downed power lines. Sure enough, soon after the house was finished, Gallant got a phone call from the distressed owners: Lightning had struck a utility pole near their house, sending a tidal wave of voltage through the wires, past the main breaker panel, and into the house. “It burned out the motherboard in the Sub-Zero refrigerator, fried the temperature controls in the double-wall oven, killed six dimmers, two computers, and every GFCI plug in the house,” Gallant says. “It was an $11,000 loss.” Could you imagine that happening in your home? Sure, lightning strikes of that magnitude are rare, but devastating nonetheless. However, the likelihood of your home suffering a damaging power surge from other outside sources as well as inside sources is much higher. And those more frequent surges can cause a tremendous amount of damage.

What Can Smaller Surges Damage?

The smaller power surges, for instance, those coming from large appliances cycling off and on as well as outside sources such as downed power lines can cause damage throughout your home and lead to things like this:

Circuit boards in expensive electronics being destroyed
Electronic control boards of large appliances such as stoves, refrigerators and washers and dryers being fried
Loss of expensive home computers and laptops as well as the data, family photographs and videos being lost.
The interruption or destruction of important safety and security devices like security cameras, fire detection systems and video door bells
The loss of everything considered a smart home device like lighting, blinds, landscape lighting and more.

As you can see, even smaller surges can result in loss of family security as well as electronics, appliances and equipment that will be costly to replace. Installing whole home surge protection acts as a barrier to protect your entire home and every single electrical device inside.

Layering Your Whole Home Surge Protection

Whole home surge protection safeguards against power surges over a certain voltage. For example, if your home is protected with a 700 VPR (voltage protection rating) your whole home surge protection allows power surges through that are up to 700 volts. Sure, 700 volts of electricity won’t destroy everything in your house, but it can destroy sensitive electronics such as home entertainment systems. Therefore, it’s important to add an extra layer of safety in addition to your whole home surge protection. You can do this by having an electrician install point-of-use surge protection that consists of GFCI (ground fault circuit interrupters), AFCI (arc fault circuit interrupters) or combination GFCI and AFCI outlets. In addition, an electrician can offer other means of lower voltage protection by installing GFCI circuit breakers into your homes electrical service panel along with your whole home surge protection.

Let iTrust Install Your Whole Home Surge Protection and More

iTrust Home Services has licensed electricians in Alpharetta Georgia and surrounding areas that are trained in the latest electrical codes and the installation of any electrical components you may need, including whole home surge protection. They will come to your home, determine your needs and create a personalized service plan. From there, you will be given access to a custom Co-Construct online page where you can see your estimates, payments, work orders, supplies and more. Additionally, you can follow the electrician’s work schedule, ask questions and even change or add-on to your work orders before they are finalized. Finally, our Georgia licensed electricians will install your whole home surge protection along with any other electrical component you need safely, neatly and in a time frame that won’t disrupt your electrical service and your family schedule. You can rely on iTrust’s electricians for superior quality, high-value products and trustworthy service, guaranteed.

Call an Alpharetta Georgia Electrician from iTrust Home Services Today!

Let our licensed Georgia electrician install your home surge protection today. Or call us for other services such as home generators, home rewiring, smart lighting installation, home remodeling and so much more. Contact us today.