You should have all of your home appliances running through a surge protector of some kind. It's an easy form of protection against the crippling effects of power surges and is the number one line of defense for safe guarding electronic devices and the sensitive components within them. You can provide protection for your entire home by installing a whole house surge protector at the breaker box, but internal surges can rise and still hurt your equipment beyond the protection of a whole house system.
It is better to install both types, external protection, as mentioned above; and point-of-use protection, which is a single surge protector that plugs into an outlet. In the event of a lightning storm, your external protection can't stop a direct blast of lightning as the surge will be too much for it to absorb. But the surge can filter out throughout your home and the threat can be lessened at an individual appliance where single surge protection is used.
As for your external protection, it may be destroyed by a lighting blast and in that case, will need to be replaced. However, if the strike was at a distance and a surge is caused by affected underground lines, then you will have nothing to worry about as that is exactly what external surge protection is made for. It will protect your home at the point of entry, either at the power meter or on the internal line side of your breaker box.
While that is a lot of information to absorb there is still the matter of choosing the right protection for your appliances. If you look through any surge protector reviews you will see countless types of surge protectors for every kind of appliance. The first and foremost rule on choosing the right protection is to know the difference between a 6 outlet surge protector and a power strip. And the answer you are looking for is simple: a power strip does not protect you from power surges.
A power cord will only provide you a way to plug a lot of appliances into your wall outlet and expose them to surges in electricity. While the two can look the same, only one will benefit you. This will be the one with a Joules rating on the package. This will be the surge protection device that will save your electronics and still allow you to plug a lot of appliances into your wall outlet.
Joules is simply the measure of power that can be absorbed by an appliance surge protector.
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