Originally Posted by
petthefabric
At a friends house a tree limb fell on the power line going to the house. The surge caused everything electric to fry.
We talked with professionals about surge protectors. It is possible to put a surge protector to the whole house. We choose to get the highest protector(s) and put everything of any value connected to surge proctectors: microwave, refrigerator, long arm, all computers and sewing machines, TV. The clocks/radios and lights aren't protected.
If you mean you also put point-of-use surge protectors in place, in addition to a whole house one, smart call.
Whole house help for issues coming in on power lines, but do nothing for issues generated within the house (appliances going bad, lightning strike), on cable or phone lines, or a nearby cloud-to-ground lightning strike.
We had one of the last type - lightning hit ground, energy traveled up the phone line, took out anything connected to a phone line (including the 400 ft. long phone line itself).
For a sit-down longarm, you're ok with a standard surge protector. If you have a frame mounted longarm with robotics, you actually want a UPS - uninterruptible power supply. This has a large battery in it that keeps the computer circuitry running for a short time so that you can safely stop and shut down the longarm. Even better is a line-interactive UPS with power conditioning/voltage regulation to ensure constant, even power to the longarm. Cyberpower makes some interesting ones - you would want to look only at the sine wave models, not the simulated sine wave ones.
Simulated sine wave isn't generally recommended for computer systems.