Surge protection?

A whole house surge protection unit installed near the main breaker box (panel-board) or service entrance is the best way to go.

No kidding. He asks about a $5 surge protector and you recommend a $500 household upgrade. Thanks genius.

i almost spit my coffee all over my laptop...

he gave the "correct" advice...

the 5 dollar "surge protector" is worthless...

fwiw, whole house here (which didn't cost 500), sub plugged straight into the wall...

Not really, it provides all the protection one needs for 99.999% of power surge 'hits'. What it won't protect against is a direct lightning strike, but where that's concerned nothing will. Do you know why Tripplite has a $25k damage guaranty? Because they know the possibility of damage is so slight that it's a very safe bet, even when there's no protection in place. Expensive surge and filtering devices address a problem that doesn't exist, much like expensive cables, and it's no coincidence that Monster sells both.

^^^

realistically, those 99.999% of hits wouldn't hurt anyway... so while it may provide peace of mind, it's still essentially worthless... otherwise, people would be routinely destroying dozens of other products in their household, as virtually everything these days has some type of electronics in it that would be damaged...

i agree with you on the rest of it though, especially the "guarantee" part... if i was really concerned about lightning, i'd want a lightning rod...

The surge protector/conditioner industry owes its existence to the PC industry. When every computer company was trying to grab market share by seeing who could lose the most money on every sale they cheaped out big time on the power supplies, so you wanted to use an external surge protector and line filter to make up for what they left out. The audio industry had figured out by 1935 how to make their gear immune to power issues.

^^^

yea, i remember those days...

heck, some people still insist on a ups... even though the "disk read/write head crashing" issue was solved many moons ago...

to the op... think for a second about all the devices you plug in to "non surge protected" outlets... cell phone, tablet, washing machine, etc...