Often overlooked, surge protection comes in three categories: Coarse, Medium and Fine. 

Coarse protection is for gross overvoltage conditions such as a lighting strike or where 11kv power lines come in contact with domestic supply lines - for example after a car accident with a power pole. The protection device is located on the outside of the house or at the main switchboard.

Medium protection is usually in the form of a MOV (metal oxide varistor) protected powerpoint or power strip. These devices are designed to protect from voltage spikes of several hundred volts or less. The better ones will sound a buzzer when they have failed while protecting your equipment.

Fine protection is normally found it the form of a line conditioner or UPS.  UPS's come in two types, direct on line and line interactive. 

Direct on line generate their own sine wave for the connected equipment to be fed from and the equipment never sees the mains.  This is the best type of UPS, however they are more expensive than the line interactive, which monitor the line voltage and when they see an issue like a low voltage condition, brownout or blackout they switch in to provide coverage, the connected devices will experience momentary faults before protection is commenced. 

Line conditioners are basically line interactive UPS's without the batteries, providing fine protection from spikes and transients on the power supply but no 230v backup. A good surge protection strategy is to provide layers of protection in coarse medium and fine surge arrestors, with expensive equipment like projectors, AV equipment and Computers protected with a UPS.

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