Surge Protection:
What One Storm Can Cost

The call always comes the morning after a storm. The TV will not turn on, the fridge is dead, the solar inverter is showing a fault, the internet modem has gone, and the garage door opener has stopped responding. Four or five separate appliances, all failed at once, all out of warranty as far as the manufacturer is concerned because a surge is not a manufacturing defect.

The device that would have prevented most of it costs a fraction of one of those appliances and mounts inside your switchboard.

What a surge actually is

Your supply sits at a nominal 230 volts. A surge is a spike far above that — hundreds or thousands of volts — lasting microseconds. Modern electronics are built for 230 volts and have very little tolerance for anything beyond it.

A direct lightning strike is the dramatic version and the rarest. Most of the damage we see comes from everything else:

• Nearby lightning, which induces a spike into the network without hitting anything you own
• Network switching, as the utility reconfigures or restores supply after a fault
• Supply restoration after an outage, which is a genuinely common cause and the reason multiple appliances fail at the same moment
• Large motors on your own property — a pool pump, an air conditioner compressor, a workshop machine — switching off and sending a spike back down the circuit
• Transformer and line faults in your street

Storm season on the Sunshine Coast gives us all of the above, often several times in one afternoon.

Most surge damage is not caused by lightning hitting your house. It is caused by lightning hitting somewhere near your street, or by the power coming back on after it did.

What the damage looks like

Sometimes the appliance dies on the spot and the cause is obvious. The more expensive pattern is the one nobody connects to the storm: a spike that does not kill a device but degrades it. The fridge that fails six weeks later, the inverter that starts throwing intermittent faults, the TV that develops a flicker. Repeated small surges age electronics quietly, which is why protection is worth having in a house that has never had an obvious failure.

What is at risk in a typical home adds up faster than people expect — TVs, computers, the modem and router, a solar inverter, a battery, an EV charger, the oven and cooktop electronics, the fridge, the washing machine control board, air conditioning, the alarm and CCTV system, and every charger in the house.

Where a surge protection device goes

At the switchboard

The main device mounts in your switchboard beside the circuit breakers and protects everything downstream of it — every circuit, every outlet, every hardwired appliance. It takes the incoming spike and diverts it safely to earth before it reaches your wiring.

This is the one that matters, and it is the one most Queensland homes do not have. It needs a properly sized earth path and a spare way in the board, which is why a full or nearly full board sometimes has to be addressed first.

At the appliance

A point of use device — a protected powerboard or an inline unit — handles what is left and gives you a second layer on the gear that would hurt most to replace. A home office, a media setup, a server or a gaming PC all justify one.

Point of use protection on its own is the common mistake. A protected powerboard cannot do anything about a spike arriving on your hardwired circuits, so your oven, air conditioning, inverter and smoke alarms are all still exposed. The board level device is the foundation; the powerboard is the extra.

Solar, battery and EV

These three deserve specific mention because they are the most expensive electronics in a modern house and the most exposed. An inverter is connected to your roof on one side and the grid on the other, which gives a surge two routes in. If you have solar or a battery, or you are adding an EV charger, surge protection stops being optional in any sensible reading of the risk.

What it costs, and when to do it

A switchboard mounted device is a small fraction of what it protects. The labour is the variable part, and it is much lower if we are already in the board.

The cheapest time to fit one is during other work:

• As part of a switchboard upgrade, where the board is open anyway
• When a solar or battery system is installed
• When an EV charger goes in
• During a rewire or partial rewire

As a standalone job it is still a short visit, and worth doing before summer rather than after the first storm.

What it does not do

Being straight about the limits:

• It will not survive a direct lightning strike on your house. Nothing at this price will
• It does not protect against extended overvoltage, brownouts or outages. That is a different problem with different solutions
• Surge protection devices are consumable. Each event uses up some of the device's capacity, and eventually it needs replacing. Good units have a status indicator, and we check it during any other work. A device that has done its job and spent itself has still saved you the appliances
• It does not cover the data side on its own. Spikes also arrive through coax and phone lines, so a complete job addresses those entries too where they exist

Worth doing before the next storm

We fit switchboard mounted surge protection across the Sunshine Coast and Brisbane, on its own or as part of a board upgrade, and we will tell you honestly whether your existing board has the capacity and the earth arrangement to take one.

See our surge protection service for what is involved, or all of our electrical services. If your board still has ceramic fuses or no safety switches, start with the six signs your switchboard needs upgrading — surge protection belongs in a board that is otherwise sound, and the other devices in there protect you from a different and more immediate danger, which our comparison of safety switches and circuit breakers explains.