Siemens FS140 Whole House Surge Protection Device Rated for 140,000 Amps

SEARCHING:I went on a search to find whole-house surge protection products that would help protect the electrical appliances and other components and equipment in my home. I live in rural Missouri and our electricity provider is a Co-Op Utility that basically buys and resells electricity to customers outside the City grid. Our experience with this Co-Op has shown us that the power is not nearly as stable as "big-city" electric utilities. We regularly get power fluctuations, and occasional blackouts, brownouts, brown power, and rolling blackouts. The internal relays in my UPS for my computer go nuts (switches back and forth to battery power) about every other day due to power fluctuations. To complicate matters, we live in the mid-west where we get our fair share of lightning storms that are pretty spectacular to watch, but not so friendly on our home electricity.OTHER PRODUCTS TRIED:I tried competing products such as Delta, Intermatic, and a couple others including ones offered by the Co-Op utility, but I can't say that I have been very well protected. In the past year, a lightning storm out here took out my new refrigerator, my clothes washer, and my pressure tank for my well-water supply system. I just purchased a new HVAC heating and cooling system that I don't want to end up being fried, so I started my search.With a lot of products out there, the worst thing is that you get a false-security that you are protected just because you have some box or device connected to your electric panel and so you feel like all your expensive electrical items are safe. And then there are those store-bought surge protection plug strips that have a "joules" rating and an "insurance coverage guarantee." These may start out fine and offer limited protection to whatever is plugged into them, but in less than a year out here where I live, they begin to fail because frequent spikes in the electricity cause a degradation in the surge protection. Plus, I have yet to hear from anyone who has successfully made an insurance claim and collected money for damage to their electrical items that were plugged into those type of surge protectors. I'm not saying that they never provide protection, just that they can wear out fairly quickly and you may not be aware of it unless you have one that has a protection indicator light. Also, the amount of electrical surge protection offered by those plug strips may not work well against an intense surge, even when the plug strip is brand new.SIEMENS FS140:I stumbled across the Siemens FirstSurge FS140 Whole House Surge Protection Device Rated for 140,000 Amps and it impressed me, at least on paper to begin with. It is a UL 1449 listed, Type 2 surge protective device (SPD) with a limited 10-year warranty for the FS140 and connected equipment in your home. It provides a 900-volt protection for line-to-line surges (L-L), and it provides a 600-volt protection for line-to-neutral (L-N), line-to-ground (L-G), and neutral-to-ground (N-G) surges according to UL 1449 3rd Edition, Voltage Protection Ratings. It has a voltage clamp-down response time of less than 1 nanosecond, which is extremely fast and needed for protection of your sensitive electronic equipment.One of the things I like about this product is that it has 3 levels of protection status notification so that you always know whether your protected or not: (1) it has an audible alarm, (2) it has protection status LEDs, and (3) also has a red service LED (to notify you when the electric service or wiring is compromised). The device is well built with quality in mind; not a cheap plastic material that is used in some of the competing products. This device has a NEMA 4X indoor and outdoor rated enclosure. It's a very robust product. Its dimensions are roughly 8-1/4" long, by 3-5/8" wide, by 3" high. It has a threaded conduit connection port on the enclosure for 3/4" threaded conduit or connectors.INSTALLATION:For the installation of this device, a licensed electrician is recommended unless you are completely comfortable and knowledgeable with electrical panels, circuit breakers, and wiring practices for residential applications. A suitable volt meter is also recommended. I decided to call Siemens to ask for their input on the installation, and I was very impressed with the level of knowledge, expertise, friendliness, and willingness to help. The Siemens engineer (Ken) was nothing short of brilliant. His input allowed me to confidently and expertly install the FS140 so that it would perform the way the manufacturer intended.PERFORMANCE:After successfully installing the FS140, feeling very proud of its looks, and seeing the status lights showing correctly protected, I was still a little skeptical about how well the device would perform against surges. Coincidentally less than a week later, a thunder storm rolled thru this area and we had a resulting power failure from a lightning strike that was less than a half-mile away. After about 30 minutes the power returned (surges involved in that too), and the FS140 lit up showing a protected status. More importantly, nothing in our house including our new HVAC system was harmed by the electric fluctuations due to the nearby lightning storm. I not only feel protected, but this device has proven its worth and I am sure it will pay for itself considering the cost of repair bills from electric equipment and appliances that would otherwise be damaged from unprotected electrical surges.Thank you Siemens.EDIT:[...]The above link is a very good article on Whole-House Surge Protection Devices written by a third party reviewer where he evaluates a hand full of products. Although the Siemens product is not included in the review because it is a newer product than when the review was written, the Siemens FS140 outperforms all of those reviewed and would have come in first place. Also, I found in another third-party article that two-tiered protection where you have service panel surge protection and point-of-use surge protection (plug-strip type) is a very effective way to fully protect your electrical items. Most peoeple aren't aware that a fairly large percentage of damage also comes through phone lines and cable/satellite conections as well so anything connected to those (e.g. TVs, cable and satellite receivers, modems, routers, cordless and corded phones) are exposed without additional protection on the coax lines and modular phone lines.

Lets see how it works this hurricane season. I can’t say much yet

Seems to be working, a year later! Installed last year, lights are still green, nothing blew up! I don't know if I had any power issues, but it seems to work.

This is, I think, the highest amp-rated residential surge protector commonly available. Is it overkill? Probably. I don’t live in Florida or any of the other limited parts of the country where Siemens actually recommends this top-of-the-line model. But I use a generator during power outages, so I thought it might be nice to have a unit that can take a bit more abuse. You may find that your power company will offer surge protection at your meter for an additional fee, but supposedly a majority of surges actually originate from inside the home, so it seems like it would make good sense to have surge protection there. (If you also use a generator, though, be aware that a typical transfer switch will bypass your main panel—we use an interlock instead, so the power still goes through the main panel and will still be surge protected by this solution.)I find it a little disappointing that they don’t include the 3/4” nipple and lock nut for securing it to the side of your panel. The Eaton CHSPT2ULTRA, in contrast, seems to come with everything you’d need—although its 100 kA surge capacity rating is a bit lower, and I find it unsettling that it only uses 14 AWG wire — which I imagine is probably fine but makes it feel a little bit as though they’re not trying very hard to me. I opted to just install the Siemens inside my Cutler Hammer panel for simplicity. I’m not entirely clear on whether Siemens considers that to be a correct installation, but it has an audible alarm so I don’t see why the indicator lights would need to be visible. And my spouse appreciated the uncluttered look of keeping them out of sight — and this is a really big surge protector, so it would certainly be very visible and perhaps quite difficult to mount depending on your space constraints. (As an alternative, I noticed from another reviewer’s photos that they used a 90-degree liquid-tight conduit elbow to mount it against the outside wall of the panel box, and I thought that was kind of clever.) Ideally you’d keep the wire as short as possible while installing it, but when you’re retrofitting it into a panel that wasn’t designed to nicely accommodate a surge protector, there’s only so much you can do. And I didn’t want to get into using wire nuts to completely rearrange my breakers. Probably also wouldn’t be a bad idea to twist the wires together to reduce their impedance — I think the CHSPT2ULTRA instructions might’ve suggested that. In any event, this is for taming big surge and should probably be a supplement to rather than a replacement for surge protection at individual devices.You’ll need to have room in your panel to install a 2-pole 20A breaker. (Similar for the Eaton CHSPT2ULTRA, although they recommend 50A.) If you don’t have room, you may be able to consolidate some circuits using tandem breakers if your panel supports them. Or you might look into surge breakers that can be swapped in on an existing circuit. In the case of a Cutler Hammer, Eaton model CH230SUR (for 30A circuit) or CH250SUR (for 50A circuit) can provide whole panel surge protection while acting as an ordinary circuit breaker for a 30 or 50A 2-pole circuit. Unlike the first two universal options (where you simply supply the correct breaker for your panel), that is a panel-specific solution built into the breaker itself. But if you have a Cutler Hammer panel that’s short on space then it’s probably the easiest solution.I just have to kind of take it on faith that it’s actually protecting me from the invisible damage of surges. But it seems like it was a good buy. I had a coworker mention to me that she had a power outage and when it came back a lot of her appliances weren’t acting quite the same. And I just don’t like the idea of being unprotected.Make sure any electrician that works on your home is aware of the surge protector. You don’t want them doing a high pot test with it connected.