Surge protector's and the warranty they offer are a joke....Neither work. The so called insurance that the protector companies offer are so tied up in the small print you'll never successfully make a claim. And if you do, guess what. The surge protector company will subjugate it back to your home owner's policy carrier.

Next....Your surge protector is actually WORSE than having the appliance plugged directly into the wall. Here's why. Lightning seeks the shortest path to ground. Unless your surge protector is connected to EARTH ground at the pin, then guess what? Your surge protectors use MOVs to shunt the surge to your EQUIPMENT ground conductor. That's the little copper wire in your outlet box that goes back to your breaker panel. So, the MOV will shunt the surge to the equipment ground and the lightning will travel its merry way back to your breaker box and then to earth ground. Along the way, it will fry anything connected to that equipment ground which means every outlet between your pin outlet and the breaker box.

No offense, but point of use surge protectors are the biggest snake oil scandal going. Please, please educate yourself on surge protection and dump those protectors. You will NEVER get a successful insurance claim from them and they will damage more equipment than protect what you have plugged into them.

The ONLY safe method against lightning is to unplug the pin. Second to that is a whole house surge protector installed in your panel box and tied to EARTH ground at that point. Be sure your cable/SAT and phone lines are properly grounded too at the point of entry into the home.

To understand, you have to distinguish between Earth ground and Equipment ground. Earth ground is just that...The ground rod that's buried in your yard. From there, a solid copper conductor goes to your panel box. The distance is kept short for a reason. From your breaker panel, all the romex cables that go out to your outlets, appliances, etc. carry a bare copper conductor but at this point it is referred to as equipment ground. It is no longer directly connected to Earth ground except at the ground bar on your panel box.

So, on those point of use surge protectors, they use Metal-Oxide Varisistors (MOVs) to shunt high surges to the equipment ground. The MOV is kind of like a switch. It sends the high surge from the normal current carrying wires (your load wire and your neutral) to the equipment ground bare copper wire in the outlet. That's fine for transient surges as the path back to the panel box and then subsequently to earth ground is capable of dissipating that short spike of energy. With a lightning strike, if the MOV survives and doesn't incinerate, all that energy is put to the equipment ground conductor in your outlet box. As you know lightning is seeking earth ground. So that energy travels along that copper conductor back to your panel box and then to earth ground via the ground rod. Problem is, your outlet is not point to point to your panel box. To save money, electricians usually put 6 to 8 outlets on a single breaker. So they take that copper conductor to the first box, wire nut it to the next box, then the next box and so on. So, now that copper equipment ground is carrying that lightning surge through all your boxes and anything plugged into them on the way back to the breaker panel.

As for the breaker, there is no breaker on the ground wire. The breaker is only on the load wire. That lightning surge isn't going to trip any breaker which operates on time/temperature as it's travelling along the ground...remember, the MOV did it's job and sent it there.

Oh, and PS.....Guess what happens to a MOV when it does work on a regular transient surge (say your washing machine motor shorts out)? It dies forever and forever never to work again. Think your surge strip notifies you of this....Nope, 90 times out of a hundred it does not, even the 'high end' variety.