Twenty years ago a surge took out a television. Today it takes the furnace control board, the heat pump, the range, the dishwasher, the garage door opener, the alarm panel, the router and every LED fitting in the house — because nearly all of them now contain a circuit board. The Electric Guys install whole-house surge protection at the panel across Pittsburgh and about thirty-three miles around.
A power strip under a desk protects what is plugged into it and nothing else. Whole-house protection sits at the service panel, clamps the surge as it arrives, and covers the hard-wired equipment that has no plug to protect — which is now most of the expensive equipment in a house.
Why choose The Electric Guys
- We fit it as part of panel work. If you are having a panel or service upgrade anyway, this is the cheapest it will ever be to add, because the panel is already open.
- Sized and rated honestly. A surge protective device has a joule rating, a clamping voltage and a service life. We will tell you what yours is rather than treating it as a single undifferentiated item.
- Point-of-use where it earns its place. Whole-house protection handles what comes in from outside. Sensitive electronics still benefit from a second layer, and we will say which things genuinely warrant it.
- Straight about what it does not do. No surge device stops a direct lightning strike. What it does is handle the vastly more common everyday events, which is where the actual damage accumulates.
Our surge protection process
- Look at the panel. Available space, bus condition, and whether the existing panel is a sensible thing to be mounting new equipment onto.
- Check the grounding. A surge device works by diverting energy to ground. On an older house with a marginal grounding electrode system, that part needs sorting first or the device cannot do its job.
- Size the device. Against the service and the equipment in the house.
- Install and test. Mounted at the panel with the shortest practical lead length, which materially affects how well it performs.
- Show you the indicator. These devices wear out absorbing surges, and the status light is the only thing that tells you yours has stopped working.
Why this is worth doing around here
Most people picture a lightning strike. The bigger cause is much less dramatic: switching events and faults on the distribution network itself. Greater Pittsburgh is hills, river valleys and a great many mature trees standing over overhead lines, and every limb that brings a line down, every automatic recloser operating after a fault, and every restoration after an outage sends something back down the street.
That is a useful way to think about it. If your neighbourhood loses power several times a year — which describes a lot of the hillside city streets and most of the wooded township feeders out towards Murrysville, Penn Hills and the Butler County edge — then your house is seeing the switching events that come with every one of those restorations. The damage is cumulative and it mostly shows up as equipment that dies early rather than equipment that dies visibly.
The second reason is what has been added to these houses. A 1960s Bethel Park ranch now contains a modulating furnace with a control board, a variable-speed heat pump, a smart thermostat, and quite possibly a car charger. None of that existed when the service was installed and all of it is considerably more surge-sensitive than what it replaced.
Serving Pittsburgh, PA and nearby
Across the city and out through Mt. Lebanon, Bethel Park, Monroeville, Penn Hills, Murrysville, Robinson, Moon Township, McCandless and Cranberry.
Free estimates Monday through Saturday, and it is a genuinely quick job to add alongside other panel work. Call or text (412) 501-7391.