How essential are surge protectors?

J

Joe Nonety

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For PCs, laptops and digital cameras, are surge protectors important to have?
For the laptop and digital camera there's a power adaptor/transformer in between the plug in the wall and the device - would that protect it?
 
Never used them, Never had a problem without them.

All this type of equipment has a power supply converter which should protect but i've heard that screens may be vulnerable.

I would say the old CRT screens were probably more vulnerable than the LCD screens in use now.

But I'm no expert and my pc could blow up tomorrow.
 
Same here - never used them and never had problems. However I know some people, particularly in remoter areas, whose mains electricity supplies experienced wild fluctuations (spikes and dips) who reckoned that they were a good idea. If you're concerned then they (e.g. individual surge protectors or surge protected and/or filtering socket strips) are cheap enough to be safe rather than sorry.
 
Not very up on technological things, but I know my dads pc has just blown two modems in a row due to lightening storms before he recently bought surge protectors. As ClubMan referred to, this is in a remote( ish) area.
 
Vanilla said:
Not very up on technological things, but I know my dads pc has just blown two modems in a row due to lightening storms before he recently bought surge protectors. As ClubMan referred to, this is in a remote( ish) area.
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No more up on things than anyone else, so very open to correction.

I know at home (again, remote area) we've had multiple handfree phones blown due to lightening strikes. These are plugged in at the mains, so possibly from there that the problem happened, but I was always of the assumption that the surge (or whatever blew them) came through the phone connection (I seem to remember being told to disconnect all phones and modems during lightening by a techy friend).
 
You can get surge protectors for phone connections (and not just mains connections) too.
 
ClubMan said:
You can get surge protectors for phone connections (and not just mains connections) too.
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:eek: Ahhh, now isn't that a good idea. Certainly would have saved us quite a few euro on new phones over the past few years.
 
I presume by handsfree phone you mean a cordless in which case a combined surge protected mains power socket and RJ-11 phone socket strip should do the job since the cordless phone's power supply will need a socket anyway.
 
Joe Nonety said:
For the laptop and digital camera there's a power adaptor/transformer in between the plug in the wall and the device - would that protect it?
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Possibly not unless the fuse blew before any spike made it to the connected device. As I said above, surge protection is not expensive so probably no harm in having it and being safe rather than sorry. I just never bother with it myself.
 
ClubMan said:
I just never bother with it myself.
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As you said earlier, a lot seems to depend on location.

I've lived in Dublin/Cork the last five years, yet to have experienced anything which would need the protection.

In that time the home phone [parents] has been blown twice, possibly three times (with me having basically the exact same equipment e.g. cordless phone etc), so obvious that it would be very beneficial there.
 
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