The Gulf Coast gets more lightning than almost anywhere in the country, and the grid adds its own surges every time a substation switches or power is restored after an outage. Each surge takes a little life out of every circuit board in your house: the A/C control board, the refrigerator, the washer, the garage door opener.
What a whole-home surge protector does
A Type 2 surge protective device mounts beside your electrical panel on its own breaker. When voltage spikes above a safe threshold it shunts the excess to ground in nanoseconds, before it reaches your circuits.
What it costs and how long it takes
Installation takes about an hour. The device and labor together are typically less than replacing a single A/C control board, which is the most common surge casualty we see in Katy.
What it does not do
Nothing stops a direct lightning strike. A whole-home device handles the far more common nearby strikes and utility surges. For sensitive electronics, a quality point-of-use strip is still a good second layer.
Grounding matters
A surge protector sends energy to ground, so your grounding electrode and bonding have to be sound. We check both before installing. On older Katy homes that check alone sometimes turns up problems worth fixing.