Surge protection for home theater

[RBFC]

The electrician wiring my home theater wants to install a $500 Leviton surge suppressor with the sub panel for the room. Does anyone have any experience with these products and/or have any advice for protection in this price range? I'm concerned about current throughput, as I have a Krell EV403 and 2 Krell S-1500/4 amplifiers that will be part of the electronics fed from this panel.

I believe this is the model:

http://www.leviton.com/OA_HTML/ProductDetail.jsp?partnumber=42120-1&section=39955&minisite=10251

Thanks,

Lee

 

[garylkoh]

I clicked through the link and the technology is just a 40mm MOV - a metal oxide varistor. This is simply a voltage dependent resistor that has a non-linear resistance with respect to voltage. It will be placed across the power line, and if the voltage goes up, it shunts the voltage to ground. They don't act fast enough to protect your gear. It can protect against transient over voltage and because it is a shunt in parallel with the circuit, should not affect current throughput.

Inside the $498 box, with monitoring circuits, etc. the essential technology is probably something like this:
http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail...=sGAEpiMZZMuQmL5N8IqpX9t3hi1gkmAI4y77t4MRwwQ=

They are useful for protecting against lightning strikes (not a direct strike though), but they don't do anything against spikes. Only surges. It's the spikes that hurt your sensitive electronic gear.

 

[RBFC]

Thanks, Gary!

Lee

 

[Speedskater]

While $500 seems a bit pricy, the Leviton unit is very adequate to do the protection job. But the unit should be placed at the home's service entrance.
For audio system only protection, consider the even more pricey Series Mode Surge Protectors. Some manufacturers of series mode surge suppressors are listed below:
Brick Wall
ZeroSurge
SurgeX

 

[RBFC]

So, I guess the pertinent question is: Do I tell the electrician to forget the Leviton? The room budget will simply not handle anything much more, so more expensive options are out for now. Is this unit better than nothing, and will do no harm, etc.?

Lee

 

[garylkoh]

When placed at the service entrance (where power comes in to the house from the street), it should do no harm. $500 sounds pricey to me for what it is, but it's cheap insurance against power surges. However, being a parallel protector, if the surge is big enough it will blow the MOV, then it will be big enough to blow up everything in the house. Fast acting circuit breakers are also a must. I would use RCBOs for the sensitive circuits at least. Not sure if they are code or available in the US....

 

[DonH50]

I have a similar unit but IIRC it was about $300 for that plus a lightning arrestor installed. Of course that was about 20 years ago... We have had some very close strikes and many small power surges and no failures. I would go for it.

One thing about MOV's is that they do degrade as they are activated. Cheap ones only last a time or two; the good ones will work for years. Not sure what bandwidth you're considering Gary? The MOV's are decently fast though no match for some nastier spikes. However, the input transformer in your equipment will filter most of that if it gets that far.

A direct lightning strike is going to destroy things. Something that travels for miles is not going to be slowed much by a MOV or even a small spark-gap suppressor. But, nothing in our house was damaged (except my nerves) when a tree was hit about 50' from the house.

 

[daytona600]

http://www.dehn-international.com/en

$500 very expensive try Dehn or Merlin Gerin , ABB Ge