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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>In surge prone areas

What areas are surge prone?

Areas with lots of thunderstorms. Also more rural areas with long power lines with few taps off for customers — the long runs are both exposed to many nearby strikes and accept induction well, and the few customers are fewer power sinks to dissipate the spike. So, you're more likely to get hit, and hit harder.

Sounds like if you're in an urban area with buried lines, you don't have to worry?

I would recommend a circuit surge protector in urban areas.

Lightning getting through some structure and hitting the electric lines happens. Even when they are buried. It's less of a problem when the ground absorbs a lot of the power before it even get into copper, but it's even less of a problem if there's some cheap device that will burn and protect you from it.

In urban areas you probably can just have the whole-house surge protector and skip the rest, since that protects all costly electronics not just a single device. With just a surge strip on the PC I'd say you're a tad under-protected, yeah.

Incidentally whole-house surge protection is now required by code in new houses. Existing buildings aren't required to upgrade, but by my reasoning what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

No, just worry less about big lightning, but urban areas have many more sources of different types of spikes and line noise

The California bay area, at least all the sides of it I’ve lived on. We currently have a whole house battery, whole house surge protector, a second surge protector, and a UPS between the router/nas/etc and PG&E.

It’s not good enough. At least the power stays on once the grid stops bouncing (or once I manage to log into the rebooting battery gateway computer to have it flip the “off grid” breaker, or go outside and flip the manual one by the meter).

Color me skeptical. I've lived in several different Bay Area cities for decades. There are usually a couple power outages per year but I've never experienced a surge strong enough to cause equipment damage.

Huh, interesting. I've lived in the bay area for 22 years (first 6 of them in various places from SJ up the peninsula, remainder in SF), and I've never experienced damage to anything due to a power surge.

Not saying you're lying, but I do wonder if your experience is typical.

I've lived all over the peninsula, your experience is not normal.

I had far more power outages during my late teenage years in suburban Dallas than I've ever had in the bay. That was due to a bad transformer in the neighborhood which took years to replace, but once it was replaced everything was perfect. The moral of the story being: if your power is bad, it's probably because some piece of mains infrastructure near you is broken.

I had a string of annoying outages in 2023-2024, but it was all due to main service upgrades on my street, can't really complain about that.

Open aerial wiring can shortcircuit two phases, bringing a low impedance surge that can damage most electric and electronic equipment.

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