Tuesday, March 9, 2021

Adding a Whole House Surge Protector

 Out power went on and off multiple times last week, and while we had no apparent long-term problems as a result, it reminded me that we could.  The main problem with power supplies seem to be surges, and so we have some of our stuff plugged into surge protectors, but things move around, and maybe it would be best to just protect everything.  And I've seen suggestions this can be done at the circuit breaker box with a whole house surge protector.

There was a discussion on NextDoor about this, and several people recommended Grayzer Electric, so I sent them a note. They wanted to know if there was room in our circuit breaker box -- it needs two slots.  So I sent them a picture of the circuit breaker box.


This shows the two empty slots at the bottom, right.

So they came out and installed an Eaton Surgetrap.


They put it at the top, in slots 21 and 22.  These were previously the Stove and Oven circuits, which got moved down to 37 to 40. 


That pretty well fills the circuit breaker box, with the exception of 20, the half slot at the very bottom of the left column.  (Also circuit 26 had a breaker, but is not attached to anything, and the wire inside the box is capped off, but must go to something?)

We now have an additional thing -- the little black plastic box below the circuit breaker box, which tells us the status of the surge protector.

The two little green LED lights at the bottom show it is working correctly.  If there is an issue, those should change.

At the same time, as long as he was already here, we had the circuit breaker itself changed for the Solar Grid Tie in slots 18 and 19.  This had tripped twice in the past few months for no apparent reason, so either it has just aged badly, or there is some other problem in the solar system that we will probably encounter again.

 Both items -- the whole house surge protector and the replaced solar grid breaker -- took about an hour and cost $316.24