Hot take: the old timer who told me to skip surge protection on panel installs was dead wrong

He said most houses in my area never get power spikes, so I skipped it on a job in Oakwood last month. Now the homeowner's panel is fried after a storm, and I'm on the hook for replacing it. Anyone dealt with a bad tip that cost you real money?

3 comments

3 Comments

robin5911mo ago

Read a thing from an old electrical forum where a guy said the same thing and ended up covering a $2k replacement out of pocket. Your story just proves cheaping out on surge protectors is never worth it.

taylorshah1mo ago

Have you ever looked at your home theater setup and thought, "you know what, I could probably get away with that $9 power strip from the dollar store"? Because I definitely have, and boy was that a mistake. My buddy's TV got fried during a storm and he was out $1,200 because his "surge protector" was basically a fancy extension cord. I ended up buying a proper one after that, and honestly the peace of mind is worth more than the $40 I spent. It's like buying cheap tires for your car - sure it might work for a while, but when it fails, you're going to wish you had spent the extra cash.

morgan.rose1mo ago

Is it really that cut and dry though? I mean, I get that you got burned literally in this case, but there's got to be some nuance here. Old timers have been doing this for decades and most of the time their advice works for the specific area they're in. Maybe Oakwood is just unlucky or that storm was a freak thing that wouldn't have happened again for another 50 years. I guess I'm just saying it's easy to point fingers after something goes wrong, but if it saved money on a hundred jobs before this one, maybe the math still kind of works out?