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I called panel surge protection 'upsell nonsense' until a guy in Tampa showed me a $1,800 service call
Three years back I refused to push surge modules on panel swaps because I figured it was just extra profit for the company. A tech named Ray in Tampa kept telling me Florida storms fry boards and he had the paperwork to prove it. I brushed him off for about a year. Then last spring I did a panel change in a house near the water and lightning took out the alarm board, the keypad, and the siren driver six weeks later. Customer wanted me to eat the $1,800 repair since I never offered the add-on. Now I quote the surge module on every single job, and not one customer has pushed back yet. Anyone else change their tune on add-ons after getting burned on a callback?
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the_lucas5d ago
That $1,800 figure hits close to home because I went through almost the same thing in Gulf Shores back in 2019, except mine was a $2,300 claim when a strike came in through the coax and cooked the modem, two TVs, and the garage door opener on a panel I'd swapped eight months before. Here's the part most people skip over though, it's not really the surge module that saves you, it's the grounding and bonding being right when the module goes in. A surge device on a house with a bad ground rod or a loose bond is just a green light on the wall that gives the customer a false sense of safety. So now when I quote the add-on I also walk the ground and hit the water pipe bond and the UFER if it's there, and I put that on the invoice as its own line item. That way if something does pop later, you've got a paper trail showing you checked the whole path and not just screwed a box to the side of the panel. Your mileage may vary by state but in coastal areas with sandy soil the ground rod situation is usually worse than the surge question.
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