Surge Protection near you

The two are not alternatives; they do different jobs at different scales. Switchboard protection is the first line and takes the large energy events arriving on the supply, clamping them before they reach the circuits. It protects everything in the house, including the oven, the air conditioner, the pool equipment and the garage door motor, none of which can be plugged into a powerboard.

Point-of-use protection is the last line and deals with what is left, plus surges generated inside the house downstream of the board. It is the right place for a home office, a television and audio stack or a network cabinet. Used on its own it has a specific weakness: equipment connected to more than one service, such as a television with both a power lead and an antenna lead, can be damaged by a surge that arrives along the path that was not protected.

The cheapest mistake is a protected powerboard bought once and never looked at again. The protective components inside are consumed by the surges they absorb, and most units have an indicator that tells you whether the protection is still functioning. If a board has been in place through several storm seasons and has no working indicator, it is an extension lead with a marketing claim on it.

The mains are the obvious path and the most common one. A strike to the network, a fault, or switching on the distribution system sends a transient down the supply and into every house on that section. This is why damage often appears at several houses in a street at once, and why the event that killed your modem may have happened well away from your suburb.

The second path is the one that comes in over the roof. A television antenna, a satellite dish, a solar array and its direct-current cabling, and any aerial on a mast are all elevated conductors connected to something inside the house. Equipment that survives a mains surge is frequently destroyed by one arriving down a coaxial lead into the back of a television.

The third is the run between buildings. A cable to a shed, a studio, a pump or a gate motor, especially a long buried run, picks up energy from a nearby strike and delivers it to both ends. Protection at the outbuilding as well as the house is the usual answer, and a quote that includes only the main switchboard for a property with detached buildings has solved half the problem.

Everything inside the switchboard enclosure belongs to a licensed electrician, and Western Australia's wording explains why the plug-in market confuses people: it is illegal for an unlicensed person to carry out electrical work, including modifications to fixed wiring, and fitting a device onto the rail is exactly that. A protected powerboard bought off a shelf is a product you plug in; a device at the board is an alteration to the installation.

The paperwork follows the work rather than the product, so ask what compliance document your state requires for a switchboard alteration and make sure the device is named on it. A surge protective device that appears on no record is one nobody will think to check in ten years, which matters more than usual for a component designed to wear out.

One practical consequence: if the electrician tells you the switchboard has no space, or that the earthing needs attention first, that is not an upsell in disguise. Surge protection fitted to a board whose earthing is poor is protection in name only, and a board with no room is usually a board that has been added to for decades.

Surge protective devices are consumable. They work by absorbing and diverting energy, and each event uses some of their capacity, so a device that has done its job for several seasons may no longer be capable of doing it again. Most installed devices and better powerboards carry a status indicator, and looking at it is the entire maintenance routine.

Build the check into the storm season. After any severe storm or a local outage, look at the indicator on the switchboard device and at the indicators on protected powerboards, and replace anything showing a fault. Replacement of the switchboard device is electrician's work; a powerboard you can simply retire.

The second habit is worth more than the hardware. During a severe electrical storm, unplug what you can afford to unplug, particularly equipment with both a power lead and an antenna or data lead, because the only protection with a perfect record is physical disconnection. That is a complement to installed protection, not a substitute for it, since hardwired equipment cannot be unplugged at all.

Read what the surge protection product actually promises. Some manufacturers offer a connected-equipment guarantee, which is a contractual promise with its own conditions about installation, evidence and claim windows. That is separate from your statutory rights: the ACCC says a manufacturer's warranty is an extra promise that applies in addition to your consumer rights and cannot replace, change or take them away.

Your consumer guarantees cover both halves of the job. The device is goods, which must be of acceptable quality, match their description and be fit for any purpose you made known; the installation is a service, which must be carried out with an acceptable level of care and skill. If you told the electrician the point of the job was to protect a specific inverter or a network cabinet and the installation left that path unprotected, that is a service guarantee question rather than a product one.

Separately, check your home and contents policy for how it treats damage from electrical surge, since insurers differ and some conditions turn on whether damage was caused by lightning specifically. Ask before the storm season, not after it.