Hi there,
I've been doing some research on protecting home electronic equipment in the last little bit and have come across an interesting article. I had started out looking at the standard "surge" protectors and noticed that you can get $20 powerbars all the way up to the $250 monster brand surge protectors so I wanted to find out what the difference was and stumbled across this article:
http://www.bitzenbytes.com/Content-Arcanum-18-1-16.html
The long and short of it is that a true surge is an event that happens extremely rarely and the only protection from it is a whole house surge protector at the point where the electric line comes in and is close to an actual earth ground. Surge protectors are useless when dealing with lightning strikes, blackouts, brownouts, line noise, and line harmonics (not sure what that is).
What does everyone else think? To me, the article makes a good case.
So, the next questions I have would be if I accept that plug in surge protectors are useless, what are the real threats to our electronics and how do we protect against them? How sensitive is the computer or home theater system compared to an unprotected digital alarm clock or phone base that has been fine through all sorts of crap?