We've had both lightning and a fault in the main electrical line. The lightning hit the house in back and fried a few things. After that, our electrician installed the whole house surge protector in the box. When the fault took place, we lost 9 things. The fault blew out an old electrical fixture in the laundry room, which actually smoked. The small electrics including phones, TV, fax, window air conditioner and the motor to the air jet tub.It blew out the refrigerator and microwave but not the oven, cooktop or dw. No idea whether the protector helped with some things and not others. Difficult to say when there's a line break vs a storm or other. Insurance took care of most of replacement -- not 100% -- in each case. We were advised to get lighting rods put on the house but the price was so obnoxious we never went forward with it. I hope and pray no one has to go through this or worse (having seen tornado pics yesterday).

Accomplish? Only to alert people to the fact that this surge protector has the potential to catch fire. I rather imagine many people leave their computer on all of the time thinking the surge protector will guard their equipment. Perhaps this is naive but there it is, the last thing I ever expected was for the thing to suffer a melt down. The thing is that we have other electronics hooked up to surge protectors (other brands) and none of them caught fire. We have one that no longer works but that is my understanding of what is supposed to happen when they take a hit. They no longer work and need to be replaced. I hope to make people aware of the problem and that perhaps they should not buy this particular brand since the problem seems to be ongoing and with other models. In addition, based on my experience the company doesn't seem to be overly concerned that there could be a safety issue. . I wish I had been better informed before I purchased this item and thought I might be able to help someone else by reporting this. I don't really need any help since I think I have done about as much as I can do at this point by contacting the Product Safety Commission, Consumer Affairs, etc. And by being allowed to post the information on this forum. Thanks for your reply.

We had a lightening strike here about 2 weeks after taking delivery of our LG TROMM Washer/Dryers last year. The strike came in through the cable service outside the garage. It took out a lot of devices in our house... 2 TiVos, our wireless phone system, cable modem, wireless router, one motherboard on one of the computers, the sprinkler controller, and several X10 device controllers. It was a very expensive day. Obviously, the electrical charge that came into the house jumped across all wired systems- cable, phone, network, and electrical. I didn't have any surge protectors on any of the systems. I'm not sure if they would have helped. My daughter was in the garage at the time of the strike putting her bike away. She saw a blue-white charge/flame enter the side of the garage just in front of where she was standing. She was scared, but fine. To the point... our LGs were plugged in at the time in the utility room, about 2 feet through the wall from where it entered. Amazingly, they were fine. I really was surprised. They were so close to the source, and plugged in, I thought for sure they were fried, too. I now have surge protectors on everything in the house. Including single outlet ones on the LGs. Just 2 weeks prior, a house in our neighborhood, on our street, was hit by lightning, and burned down. It came in through a lightning strike to the ground, into the house electrical service through the underground electric wires, and started a fire inside the wall at the circuit breaker box. I considered myself lucky. Go get a surge protecor. They're cheap. It might save you from an expensive repair... might not. They have their limits too.

A good homeowner's policy is probably the best "surge protection" you will find. The thing about these devices is that there is no way to know if they actually do protect anything in a given instance. You could possibly install all three of the devices you list and have a so-called surge immediately after- then you notice that your new cooktop doesn't work. All you know for sure is that there was an unusual event and that your cooktop failed afterwards. You don't know if (A) the #$%^& protector is worthless. (B) the protector saved every other electric device in your house from damage. (C) the cooktop just failed and the strke had nothing at all to do with it. I have a unit similar to the Square D model. The primary reason I have it is so I can illustrate to my insurance agent that I have taken "reasonable steps" to prevent damage as required by the wording of my policy.